There are firemen with no boots, cops with no cars, teachers with no pencils, city council members with telephones tapped by the FBI, and too many grandmothers with no tears left to give.īut Detroit can no longer be ignored, because what happened here is happening out there. It is the unemployment capital, where half the adult population does not work at a consistent job. It is the country’s illiteracy and dropout capital, where children must leave their books at school and bring toilet paper from home. Once the nation’s richest big city, Detroit is now its poorest. A city the size of San Francisco and Manhattan could neatly fit into Detroit’s vacant lots, I am told. Trees and switchgrass and wild animals have come back to reclaim their rightful places. Its downtown is a museum of ghost skyscrapers. Detroit, which once led the nation in home ownership, is now a foreclosure capital. It is an eerie and angry place of deserted factories and homes and forgotten people.
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