To Pillage and Plunder: Republican Leadership to Make 150,000 Homeless in Detroit

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Last updated on October 28th, 2014 at 11:46 am

Republicans absolutely love free, unregulated capitalism.

And why wouldn’t they? In the absence of regulation, millionaires and corporations are free to exploit the working class for their own personal benefit. With no set regulations in place, those at the top of the societal pyramid are free to do as they will with their accumulated wealth, including using their vast fortunes to provide themselves with even more money, even if others have to suffer for them to do so. In a country where the richest 1% of Americans have captured 95% of the post-financial crisis growth since 2009, there have been limitless opportunities for them to add to their newly added wealth at the expense of other, less financially stable citizens.

Nowhere has this model been more apparent than the city of Detroit.

In the next year and a half, as many as 150,000 people are expected to lose their homes due to foreclosures, representing nearly 1/5 of the entire population of the city. The first portion of these foreclosures was kicked off earlier this month where a plan was announced by Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr in collaboration with city mayor Mike Duggan. Orr was personally appointed by Republican governor Rick Snyder and Duggan ran for mayor on a slogan of “Every neighborhood has a future.” However, the plan that Orr and Duggan approved would end up selling off more than 6,300 properties in a public auction in the neighborhoods of Hamtrack and Highland Park in what is being termed a “blight bundle” due to the fact that roughly 1,000 of the properties are deemed valuable while the others seem destined for demolition. By announcing this upcoming public auction, this unholy triumvirate of Republican leadership has proven to be willing to evict thousands of lifelong Detroit residents simply to give a billionaire or two an opportunity to swoop in and cash out on the city’s misfortune.

This announcement is coming on the heels of a manufactured water crisis where the mainstream media intentionally misled the public as to the true cause of the situation. It was not, as major media outlets would have you believe, simply due to Detroit residents not paying their water bills but rather gross negligence by the Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) who claimed that they had incorrectly billed Detroit residents for six years due to a “systems change.” However, in an effort to reconcile what they believed to be missing income, the DWSD then sent bills out to reclaim its missing retroactive fees which ended up totaling $116 million dollars. Unfortunately, this was done in such a way that there was no accountability nor fairness involved in the process. For example, local churches were charged exorbitant fees despite having consistently paid their bills while some residents were charged for water usage despite not even having lived at that residence during the time period they were billed for. Eventually, water was restored to the areas in the city affected by the water crisis, but the entire situation left a bitter taste for everyone involved. As Monique Lin-Luse of the NAACP Legal Defense fund stated, “Hitting residents with six years’ worth of retroactive, cumulative sewage bills at a time when they are struggling to pay existing water bills is adding insult to injury.”

Things in Detroit got so bad during this time that the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a statement condemning the treatment of the city’s poor. Part of the statement read:

About 80 percent of the population of Detroit is African American. According to data from 2013, 40.7 percent of Detroit’s population lives below the poverty level, 99 percent of the poor are African American. Twenty percent of the population is living on 800 USD or less per month, while the average monthly water bill is currently 70.67 USD. This is simply unaffordable for thousands of residents, mostly African Americans.

We were deeply disturbed to observe the indignity people have faced and continue to live with in one of the wealthiest countries in the world and in a city that was a symbol of America’s prosperity.

We were also distressed to learn from the low-income African American residents of the impossible choices they are being compelled to make – to either pay their rent or their medical bill, or to pay their water bill.

In other words, low-income people of color were being taken advantage of by Detroit’s rich, white elite.

And yet, this is exactly what Rich Snyder, Kevyn Orr, and Mike Duggan want. They don’t want every neighborhood to have a future. They want their neighborhoods to have a future. They want a Detroit where rich billionaires can come in and cleanse the city of not simply decaying buildings, but a population of people that they find unworthy of living in the city, despite having lived there for generations. They want a Detroit where they can build a half-billion dollar hockey stadium and spruce up the midtown area all while throwing out the poorest 20% of the population on the streets in the middle of the cold, Michigan winter. It doesn’t matter that these people are lifelong Detroit residents and that their blood, sweat, and tears has built the city up over generations, all that matters is they don’t fit the kind of people that the Republican leadership of Detroit wants in its fair city. What we are seeing in Detroit is an overt and obvious attempt by Republicans to rid the city of its poorest citizens by any means necessary.

Another shining example of compassionate conservatism at its finest.

Correction: Throughout the piece Kevyn Orr and Mike Duggan are referred to as Republicans, either implicitly or directly. Duggan was elected Detroit Mayor as a Democrat. Orr has stated that he is a lifelong Democrat. PoliticusUSA regrets this oversight and apologizes profusely for the error.