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| Black people in Detroit can't be expected to maintain its infrastructure, study finds |
There are those who would blame white people for every problem in this nation. Even white flight itself. White flight is just a natural defensive mechanism to escape the Black Undertow and the crime, property value drop, dereliction of infrastructure, and the decimation of the business district that follows this group.
In the coming weeks, Detroit will be taken over by the state of Michigan. Even though white people built a world-class city, full of architectural marvels that rivaled those found anywhere else on the planet, the Black people who inherited Detroit after the calamitous race war of 1967 (and the subsequent white abandonment of the city) have been unable to maintain a modicum of what they were unceremoniously bequeathed. The Los Angeles Times bashed white people for the failure of the city, when it was white people ingenuity that was responsible for the greatness of Detroit in the first place.
2011 Detroit is a direct representation of its majority population, which happens to be 82 percent Black. The ruins of the city, neglected and rotting monuments courtesy of a people who then rebuilt what they abandoned in the white suburbs surrounding Detroit, are to the Black inhabitants of the town what those strange heads on Easter Island where to the Europeans who first encountered them.
Your average Black inhabitant of Detroit has no understanding for how these architectural marvels were ever erected, nor could they - if trained by the top mechanical, industrial, electrical engineers and architects - ever hope to reproduce them. They can't even sustain them.
The haunting pictures of the empty Michigan Central Station; the staggering details on the facade of the Metropolitan Building still apparent despite the graffiti and trash found on the inside; Lee Plaza, once home to the elite of Detroit, now home to the elite of homeless Detroit; the Grand Army of the Republic Building, a castle erected in 1900 for veterans of the Civil War, now sits boarded up to keep out the descendants of Black people whose freedom has failed Detroit; the Broderick Tower, built in 1927, is the tallest skyscraper in America that has been deserted.
Like the post-apocalyptic world found in the book The Earth Abides, the Black people in Detroit show precious little concern for sustaining any of the city's former marvels. They find it hard to believe that people actually built them. Like the Sphinx in Egypt, Black people in Detroit sit in wonderment, gazing at some of the aesthetically - unequaled in the world for their majesty, even in their depressing state - magnificent buildings and wonder what they were once used for. Why were they even built?
It wouldn't be so bad if Detroit was the only city in America like this, but any city or county that the Black Undertow overwhelms inevitable fails.
In the south, you have Birmingham (72 percent Black), which was once one of the world's great cities. It has been rebuilt in the white suburbs surrounding the city. With Vulcan looking on, the Black Undertow which inherited Birmingham has decimated the hopes and dreams of the city founders and helped lead to the bankruptcy of Jefferson County. Mind you, it's the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.
Well, two researchers at Michigan State just published a study that blames, you guessed it, white flight for the demoralizing results of the Black Undertow's leadership over cities and counties they inherit. In ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEWS & CASE STUDIES: More Cost per Drop: Water Rates, Structural Inequality, and Race in the United States—The Case of Michigan (published in the Cambridge Journal) we learn that white people will always shoulder the blame for the problems befalling Black people:
White flight from urban centers often means minority residents are left to pay to maintain aging water and sewer systems, a new study finds.
This “structural inequality” is not necessarily a product of racism, but does mean that racial minorities pay systematically more than white people for basic municipal services.
“This study demonstrates a disturbing racial effect to the cost of basic services,” says Stephen Gasteyer, assistant professor of sociology at Michigan State University. “People of color have the fewest opportunities to leave urban centers and are left to pay for the crumbling legacy of a bygone economic era.”
For the study, reported in the journal Environmental Practice, researchers analyzed Census data on self-reported water and sewer costs in Michigan and found that urban residents actually pay more than rural residents, a finding that refutes conventional wisdom.
Perhaps more importantly, water and sewer services cost more in areas with greater proportions of racial minorities.
Detroit is the “poster child” for this problem, Gasteyer says. The city has lost more than 60 percent of its population since 1950, and the water and sewer infrastructure is as much as a century old in some areas. Billions of gallons of water are lost through leaks in the aging lines every year, and the entire system has been under federal oversight since 1977 for wastewater violations.
“A fair proportion of Detroit’s large low-income population cannot afford the burden of rate increases meant to offset infrastructure repairs, leading to tens of thousands of customers getting their water turned off every year,” Gasteyer says.
Water and sewer lines are aging throughout the country. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, hundreds of billions of dollars will be needed to repair deteriorating systems over the next 20 years.
Paying for those upgrades likely will be a major issue in shrinking cities such as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Birmingham, Ala., Gasteyer says.
“Everything is wearing out, and we are going to have to grapple with how we pay for these so-called liquid assets that need to be upgraded. At the same time, we need to be cognizant of who may be paying an unsustainable burden as those rates go up.”Wow. What an amazing study! By the way, Pittsburgh has been rated the nicest place in America to live. It's not shrinking. Detroit and the other cities Gasteyer mentioned are, but not Pittsburgh.
Structural inequality? This is getting pretty embarrassing, considering that the most impressive structure your average Black person could erect comes in a Lego box with a "for children six or under" sticker on it. White people have abandoned world class cities across this nation to the Black Undertow. Inevitably, Black people lack the ability to sustain the infrastructure they are handed over in the transition of power.
Why can't the Black engineers just fix these water pipes? Why can't the elected officials set aside money to pay outside engineering firms to do this? Oh, because Black people can't sustain an economy to raise revenue to pay for upgrades to public utilities.
However, it is this line that smells fishy:
“This study demonstrates a disturbing racial effect to the cost of basic services,” says Stephen Gasteyer, assistant professor of sociology at Michigan State University. “People of color have the fewest opportunities to leave urban centers and are left to pay for the crumbling legacy of a bygone economic era.”
Gasteyer obviously hasn't looked at what happened when white people left Africa, specifically the Congo, or what happened to Rhodesia after the capitulation to Actual Black Run Zimbabwe (ABRZ) or in South Africa. Black people can't sustain the basic services that white people created worldwide. White people (and even Black people in Detroit) flee the Black Undertow in the Motor City because of the crumbling effect that Black people have on the the urban center.
People of Color (PoC) in urban centers can only go so far as public transportation will take them, hence the decision by city leaders in Whitopia's to keep out bus systems and light-rail into their towns.
Black people can't sustain a city swimming pool, let alone plan to maintain a city's infrastructure that they have no part in building nor paying for. So those members of the Black Undertow shouldn't be forced to pay for their basic services either:
“These people are going to end up rioting about this,” says Sheila Tyson, a community activist in Jefferson County, Ala. “If they let this stuff happen they are going to get the biggest riot the South has ever seen . . . I can see it coming.”
That’s a pretty serious prediction. What could possibly start a riot that big?
She’s talking about the likelihood of Jefferson County increasing its water and sewage bill rates.
Oh. Is it really all that bad?
“If the sewer bill gets higher, my light might get cut off and if I try to catch up the light, my water might get cut off. So we’re in between. We can’t make it like this,” says Tammy Lucas, a Birmingham resident who has been affected by a “financial and political scandal that has brought one of the most deprived communities in America’s south to the point of what some local people believe is collapse,” reports the BBC.
Lucas’ monthly water and sewage rate has managed to quadruple in the past 15 years. Currently, her bill is $150 a month, which she pays for by using her $600 social security check.
When a federal judge forced Jefferson County to upgrade its outdated sewer system, officials decided to finance the project with bonds.
“Outside advisers suggested a series of complex deals with variable-rate interest . . . Loan payments rose quickly because of increasing interest rates as global credit markets struggled, and the county could no longer afford its payments,” Bloomberg reports. That’s why Jefferson County residents have seen a 329 percent increase in their rates over the past decade and a half–the county has been trying to finance these new facilities.
The sewage system was supposed to cost $300 million. However, since the project started in 1996, the costs have risen to $3.1 billion after various problems and a series of bond and derivatives deals fell through in 2008."This is not even a race issue, if I’m telling the truth,” said Tyson. “It‘s just so happens that it’s affecting black people. It’s a class issue. They don’t give a doo-doo about poor people period.”
So what does the “community activist” think should be done to fix the problem?
Riots? Black people already riot in Birmingham. It's a well-known fact that tens of thousands of Black people in Fulton County (home to Atlanta) never had to pay their water bills. They never have their water turned off either and rack up thousands of dollars in unpaid bills that the Black political elite never have these model citizens pay.“Somebody from Washington D.C. needs to come down here and take these sewer bills to where they are affordable for the people in these districts. Injustice – that’s all this is. They need to come down here and fix it,” Tyson said.
And why should they, when the cost can be redistributed to the white taxpayers in Buckhead and other white enclaves through higher property taxes?
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