Description
Book SynopsisAs America''s most dysfunctional big city, Detroit faces urban decay, population losses, fractured neighborhoods with impoverished households, an uneducated, unskilled workforce, too few jobs, a shrinking tax base, budgetary shortfalls, and inadequate public schools. Looking to the city''s future, Lewis D. Solomon focuses on pathways to revitalizing Detroit, while offering a cautiously optimistic viewpoint.
Solomon urges an economic development strategy, one anchored in Detroit balancing its municipal and public school district''s budgets, improving the academic performance of its public schools, rebuilding its tax base, and looking to the private sector to create jobs. He advocates an overlapping, tripartite political economy, one that builds on the foundation of an appropriately sized public sector and a for-profit private sector, with the latter fueling economic growth. Although he acknowledges that Detroit faces a long road to implementation, Solomon sketches a vision of a
Table of Contents
Introduction
I Some Background and Context on Detroit
1 Detroit's Challenges
2 Detroit's Substantial Assets
II Surmounting Detroit's Fiscal Crisis and Revamping Its Municipal Public Sector and Public School District
3 Struggling to Deal with Detroit's Fiscal Crisis
4 Rightsizing Detroit's Public Sector
5 Reviving the Detroit Public School District
III Economic Growth and Job Creation Fueled by the Private Sector
6 Economic Development through Corporate Relocations, Financial Repopulation Incentives, and Public-Private Partnerships
7 Economic Development through Entrepreneurship and the Creative Class
IV A Vision of and Obstacles to the Creation of an Alternative Political Economy Sector
8 The Potential Role of an Alternative Political Economy Sector in Detroit's Revival
9 Conclusion: Evaluating the Likelihood of Success
Index
