As someone who has lived in and around Detroit for their whole life, I found this article to be very insightful. By far, the best part of Detroit is a trend of extremely creative people being able to do whatever they want with their respective spaces. It goes far beyond painting a mural or erecting a sculpture. There are huge gardens[1], performance art spaces[2], puppet theaters[3], concert venues in industrial buildings[4], and much more. And these spaces are very cheap to maintain, relatively speaking.
For someone who hasn't lived there, but has spent some time in Detroit, can you shed some light on whether it makes sense to treat Highland Park as separate "city" apart from Detroit? I realize it may technically have it's own boundary, but to an outsider Highland Park looks like a neighborhood of downtown Detroit. I mean, it's even halfway between downtown center and the Detroit Zoo. Since Detroit as a whole is having the same problem, including many other neighborhoods, I felt like the article talking about Highland Park as distinct and separate felt weird. Is there some context there that I might not understand?
Most people, myself included, lump Highland Park into Detroit despite technically being a separate city. Hamtrack is similar. You really don't feel like you're out of Detroit until you hit the Southfield, Ferndale, and Royal Oak areas.
While I agree many people do this with Highland Park, Hamtramck is very distinct, both physically (types of houses, density) and demographically (huge immigrant populations, Polish and now Middle Eastern and South Asian). Actually, certain parts around Hamtramck (e.g. Banglatown) are often lumped with Hamtramck despite being in Detroit.
I can understand that. I guess I mentally lump it with Detroit because of the arson, infrastructure issues that I associate with the city, but it is pretty unique. Thanks.
It's not terribly uncommon for a city like Detroit to annex surrounding towns and cities, but some of them hold out, which looks like is what happened here.
Yeah, so I can understand that technically speaking, for income & property tax purposes Highland Park is it's own thing. But the big picture economics of the area are that proximity of the neighborhood means, for example, many people living in that neighborhood also work and purchase goods in Detroit but outside of the neighborhood. And Detroit as a whole has this problem, it's been written about all over the place. All of Detroit has been grappling with how to provide continuing services to the multiple neighborhoods that have lost a lot of people. So I'm just curious if there's something more I need to know than just the Highland Park boundary that warrants separating it? Or maybe even if writing about it this way is a good thing for the Highland Park residents for some reason I don't understand?
Detroit attempted to annex Highland Park multiple times in the early twentieth-century (at least in 1910, 1922, and 1924, maybe more). But Highland Park was wealthier and its residents wanted to remain independent.
Now things are different, but even if Highland Park's residents agreed to be annexed by Detroit, would Detroiters have them? Why annex a small city that's in terrible economic shape?
I think you could definitely make an argument that Detroit and Highland Park could come together and improve both their lots, but that would take a huge effort and a whole lot of political will that I'm not sure is there.
There's just no fixed process for dealing with the situation. Detroit doesn't necessarily want to assume responsibility, the residents don't necessarily want to become part of Detroit, etc. etc.
I think it is kind of a modern problem to think of government structure as a static thing. Like another example from Michigan, now that we have paved roads everywhere we should all but dissolve townships. Organizing most of what they do would work fine at the county level. There's some real neighbor stuff that they do, but they don't need to have zoning boards or road projects.
> There's just no fixed process for dealing with the situation. Detroit doesn't necessarily want to assume responsibility
True. And I'd assume that it's very complex and Detroit in many cases cannot legally or financially assume responsibility, even if it wanted to. I have no idea how I'd solve the problems there, they are tough.
The problem being written about is that the city itself has so little income and revenue that it can't provide certain basic services, and even can't necessarily partner with non-profits which are trying to address problems in different ways.
With a different government, tax base, and so on, Detroit as a whole may have similar problems, but the scale is different, and the larger scale likely means that there are some things Detroit can do that Highland Park cannot.
I'm not sure why you think that an article about one city, Highland Park, should have been about a different city, Detroit, that while it is close by, operates at a very different scale?
> I'm not sure why you think that an article about one city, Highland Park, should have been about a different city, Detroit, that while it is close by, operates at a very different scale?
Well, I did ask the question and not state it as my opinion, didn't I? And I read the article, and already explained my take on the arguments you're making. Are you asking why, or just making a point?
The Detroit native in this thread agreed that Detroit natives think of Highland Park as part of Detroit.
Highland Park is entirely contained inside the Metro Detroit boundary. Use of the word "city" here is overloaded. To an outsider, Detroit is a city and Highland Park is a neighborhood within Detroit. To the Highland Park government, "city" has a technical boundary meaning that is not necessarily relevant to people outside Highland Park, and especially to people outside Michigan.
I'd speculate that most people who don't live in Michigan reading an article about a city in Michigan would assume or imagine something geographically distinct from other cities, with fields in between them, as opposed to a continuous metropolitan area.
My question is whether there might be some political context to the way this article is written. Do you know of any?
But it is a distinct city. With a separate mayor, a separate budget, and so separate issues that it has to deal with due to its budget shortfalls. Including issues with the City of Detroit being one of its creditors, due to unpaid water bills.
It is not uncommon for there to be cities or towns in the metro area of other cities that are independent. For instance, Cambridge is different than Boston; or for an even closer example, Brookline which is surrounded on three sides by Boston is independent from Boston. Or Oakland is not San Francisco, nor is Almeda Oakland.
Or for other examples of being completely surrounded, the Vatican is not Rome. Monaco is not France.
The "technical boundary" is not irrelevant here. We're talking about different jurisdictions, with different governments, and an article about how one government is failing to provide some basic services is distinct from another government that is close by but has very different issues due to the differences of scale and available tax base.
> with fields in between them, as opposed to a continuous metropolitan area.
But that's not how cities work. It is very common for two cities to be part of one continuous metropolitan area, and the only way you notice the boundary is by paying very close attention to signs as you pass them.
> My question is whether there might be some political context to the way this article is written. Do you know of any?
I think that the context for this article is just that it's an interesting phenomenon; this small city, which grew very fast during the auto boom and has been fading slowly ever since, and now the government is so cash-strapped that it doesn't even have the personnel to work with independent non-profits to do things as basic as keeping the streetlights on, but also due to the small scale it's possible for individuals and neighborhood organizations to provide some of their own services that the city can't.
The issue of "the government barely exists", as expressed in the title, is not true of Detroit as a whole. While the Detroit government does have issues of being short on funds, it is large enough that there is a recognizable government that is able to do things. But for this small city, which grew very quickly and then has slowly been fading away, the size and scale make it very hard to have a functioning government that can reasonably govern.
And while the state and the federal government obviously do exist, for many of the things that ail Highland Park, the state and federal government generally work by providing grants to cities and towns, but being as cash strapped and small as this city is, it's hard for it to take advantage of programs that could bring in more revenue.
From reading the Wikipedia page, it seems that Highland Park had some great economic prospects in the 1910's - 1920's (Chrysler was founded there) and wanted to self-govern.
There is the College for Creative Studies (CCS) which is located in the heart of Detroit, but the tuition is steep and attracts mostly kids who grew up in the richer suburbs of metro-Detroit. Most of them probably don't stick around long after they graduate.
My guess is most Detroit artists never went to art school. The money just isn't here.
The interior is mostly concrete and drywall and there are clearly-lighted exit signs in the photographs. There has been a long history of cultural spaces in ex-industrial space, and it's perfectly safe when basic fire safety regulations for places of assembly are followed.
when basic fire safety regulations for places of assembly are followed
That's the problem. Not to paint a whole group with a single brush, but improvised bohemian sorts of facilities have a long track record of disdain for things like basic fire safety.
Pop-up concerts sold by word of mouth... tickets sold for and all involved paid in cash. In oher words:illegal. But if you want to officialy convert a space, if you want to sell via ticketmaster or get financing through a bank, then suddenly there is plenty of government. Forget fire inspectors, what is the state of the bathrooms? An ADA suit will cut far deeper than having to install sprinkers.
It is far easier to push some industrial-looking stuff into a club than try to setup a legit club inside a factory.
Why shouldn't public businesses be accessible to people without a working pair of legs?
ADA compliance is all about opening up freedom to more people. It's the coolest thing in the world to see some quadroplegic dude in a wheelchair enjoying a concert as much as the people dancing. That's freedom for that dude. Bring it on.
But if you have an old building with restrooms that are not ADA accessible does that mean you should not be allowed to host concerts there? I wasn't arguing that new buildings shouldn't be built accessibly, but do the old ones NEED to either be abandoned or remodeled?
I understand the urge to respond when we see something we think is unfairly down-voted. However, the down votes actually only says something about the few (lone?) individuals who down-voted, and very little at that. One can speculate as to their reasons, but we really can't know for sure unless they choose to comment and explain. That's one of the reasons the guidelines ask us not to comment on down votes: It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
I think the best, most constructive thing to do is upvote and expand on the comment you support. That adds to the conversation and reinforces the point the first comment made.
I'm aware of this principle, but I don't find it boring at all that more people on HN are willing to downvote accessibility than upvote it. It's horrifying. People with zero empathy are influencing the future of technology.
I wouldn't wish disability on anyone, but if you downvoted this sub-thread and you do end up disabled someday, may your curb cuts always be blocked, may the handicapped parking spaces always be parked in by your uncaring former self, and may your wheelchair break on a badly-maintained sidewalk, leaving you stranded, humiliated, and broke.
Thanks for your response. I appreciate where you're coming from. And I get frustrated, too, when I see comments that don't take others into account. I also know that when I allow my emotions to drive my actions and words without filtering them through what I think is actually going to be effective in promoting the change I want, I'm all too likely to work against those goals.
I really do believe that it's impossible to know the full motivations of who ever down voted the comment. It's easy to assume the worst, particularly when we perceive ourselves or our values as being attacked.
And to be fair, I almost never view net down votes the way you do ("more people on HN are willing to downvote [X] than upvote it.") Thank you for including that because it gives me another perspective. When I saw your comment, the text of your parent was black. I think it's likely that it was a single person who downvoted, particularly that it's so far down in a comment thread. It's definitely not the case that the comment or its context was presented to a majority of HN members and they were given the opportunity to vote. It's a small subset of members who read the comment. This subthread itself is charged: emotions are likely running higher than normal, and those who are willing to commit so far down a thread are likely to be that much more committed to whatever position they hold and may be that much more vote emotionally. I think this happens in a lot of cases. Internet forums are difficult places to have useful discussions on contentious topics.
I strongly believe that the only way we're going to be able to make progress on difficult topics (and there are a lot of them) is if we can figure out ways to honestly talk with each other from a place of giving each other the benefit of the doubt. Having empathy for people we don't agree with is even more important if we hope to make a difference. That charity, empathy, that benefit of the doubt, aren't infinite. If we come to a point where we don't think those we're in disagreement aren't dealing honestly with us, then communication has broken down. Anything we say further has to be even more strategic. How are people who you disagree with hear you talking about downvotes? Is it more likely going to change their minds? More likely to think of you as more unreasonable? I know how I tend to react.
Above I quoted the full "It never does any good, and it makes boring reading" mostly because I copied the full sentence. I think the first phrase is the most important, which is why I focused on that above. The second phrase I think is true as well, as the outcome of such comments is boringly predictable. The key for me is figuring out what is effective in producing the change I want to see.
And that's why I commented above. I hope you find this further exposition is useful for you as it as for me. Thanks again for sharing your interpretation of the downvotes. That's helpful for me.
At some point you and dang are going to have to stop excusing the sizable fascist faction on HN as being "just a few people" or some kind of balance for the other "extremist" POV. Here we have someone saying something utterly mainstream - accessibility is good - and getting downvotes for it.
HN has lurched to the right, and fascism is now acceptable here.
In many cases, accessibility rules (or fire safety rules for that matter) can prevent a business from being viable. Are we better off with a store that has a huge sign "does not meet fire code, enter at your own risk" in front of it, or with no store at all? I prefer the former.
I think you might be overzealous in using the word fascism here. While fascism does lead to the oppression of minorities and has historically lead to the oppression of the disabled [1], I do not believe that my view is a fascist one.
There is positive discrimination, telling quadriplegics that they should be euthanized. And there is negative discrimination, failing to provide an ADA compliant restroom. The former is fascist, however the latter is not in my opinion. Of course it is best if all venues have restrooms that are wheelchair accessible, however the idea that any which does not provide accessible restrooms is fascist is a logical absurdity.
Lets take your argument to its end. There are 1 million wheel chair users in the US [2]. Lets just say that any venue that negatively discriminates against 1 million or more Americans is fascist. How many restaurants are there in the US that provide separate gluten free work surfaces in order to prepare gluten free food for the 3 million with celiac disease [3]? Another million people have a milk or egg allergy and need separate work surfaces for those ingredients as well [4]. I know, it's just 120 000 people in America that are actually blind [2], but not a single grocery store provides braille packaging on all their produce. All in all there are 2.4 million who are visually disabled, they should be given well lit venues, no darkness and light shows at concerts for them, they might trip and fall in the dark. But if things are going to be well lit, what about the 3 million Americans with chronic migraines (which causes photo-sensitivity) and therefore cannot bear the bright light [5]? Its literally impossible to not negatively discriminate against someone, and I've not even gotten into religious or ethical diets and norms. So is everyone who tries to open a venue a fascist?
I could be wrong, but FWIW, I read 'DanBC's reference to fascism as applying to trends of behavior and comments on HN as a whole, not with respect to the ADA and related issues in particular.
Yeah, no kidding. We live in this era where people with all kinds of handicaps can engage more and more with society in so many ways.
Wheelchairs and the building standards that open places up to access.
Phones that can speak to you and parse your words and act on voice commands. A few weeks ago I saw a blind dude carry on a text message conversation on the bus, with someone he was going to meet, via his iphone. How cool is that??
Video game controllers that you can work with your neck movements and puffing breaths into an actuator tube.
HOW COOL IS ALL THIS STUFF??
And when it's gadgets and gear, people geek out over it all day long. How cool that that one GNOME developer submitted his last patch--when he was nearly totally paralyzed--a few days before he passed on, right?
Yet when it's building codes to open up physical spaces, suddenly the gubmint is burdening you? Fuck. that.
All this stuff is up to us to decide--what do we care about? Building a society that serves everyone, including the most vulnerable? Or propping up a status quo that leaves the most vulnerable locked out?
Sorry for the rant. Accessibility is important. Gets me riled up.
It is awesome that a paralyzed GNOME developer was able to submit a patch. However, GNOME was not accessible from the first commit, or even the first major version. GNOME is not yet %100 accessible, and if it was illegal for GNOME to be published before it was ADA compliant, than GNOME would not exist at all.
You might want to revise your original comment, then. In your first comment you clearly wrote, "In oher words:illegal," but now write, "red flag."
If the customer base exists, and the promoter can rely on word of mouth for advertising, why is it a red-flag to not want to pay anyone for advertising?
Also, why is it a red flag to accept cash, which 100% of attendees can produce instead of relying upon other payment methods which have been shown to make less money for the promoter?
Reflect on it for a moment. In this exact case, people purchasing tickets into a concert, where there is a tremendous amount of business, why pay a third party for every credit card swipe? You get the exact same number of customers if you only accept cash. In many demographics, you actually get more customers from cash-only.
Sure, some promoters and business owners will evade taxes, but people do that anyway for all sorts of businesses. In this case, accepting cash only is not an indicator of attempting to evade taxes.
Because any manager knows that handling that much cash comes with risks. Someone standing at club door taking cash, sans cash register, is dangerous. Either money goes "missing" or someone gets robbed.
That has absolutely nothing to do with your comment that people who accept cash are engaging in illegal activity.
In an all cash business, the truth is you make money hand over fist. You can't count it fast enough, even with your door person skimming - which you already expect to happen. Besides, you don't have your door people stand around all night with loads of cash in their pockets.
Oh, i live nearby; I am definitely aware. That was also horrendously illegal.
I'm not sure why you would assume they violate code except to be dramatic. Concerts have been held in industrial places in secret, but if you hear about one it's typically above board.
You're right that it's grim -- I said it because of the title of this discussion, "people being able to do whatever they want", and remembering the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, CA.
There are a bunch of cities in the US that would be best ‘fixed’ by paying everyone to leave and letting it return back to forest.
It seems like they’d have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into this city just to make it minimally functional, and they still won’t have a viable economy afterwards.
The Detroit/Warren/Dearborn MSA has a higher GDP than San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara MSA and is home to ~4 million people. Don't be confused by articles highlighting specific neighborhoods or old factories, there is a ton of economic activity. There are obviously some huge problems trying to provide government services for the same land area with a shrinking population, especially following a large recession, but "Won't have a viable economy" is silly given the number of companies in the area.
I think you make a good point. You shouldn't write off the whole Detroit area because of a few articles about specific neighborhoods. But Detroit/Warren/Dearborn essentially have the same GDP as San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara yet twice as many people live in the Detroit area
That only strengthens my point though -- The original commenter said we should just pay everyone to leave since there's no hope of sustaining an economy there.
If you can pay 4 million people to leave, you can pay to fix whatever services they are lacking -- and then you'd have 4 million people in a area with hundreds of large companies and good government services!
This is why I constantly hammer the point about comparing cities using MSA figures. Focusing on “Detroit” or “St. Louis” or “Cleveland” or whatever without understanding their place in their respective regions and how much activity surrounds them only misleads.
A failure to understand this leads to all kinds of confused and nonsensical beliefs about rust belt cities and ultimately to casual, confident assertions that can only be described as absurd (like the one you’re responding to).
Except abandoned cities won't magically go back to some idyllic paradise. They're full of value (shelter, metals, art, etc) that someone is going to want to extract. And they're also full of lots of potentially dangerous stuff too.
Dealing with broken cities will not be cheap, swift or easy. I have no ready solutions. But thinking that we can just walk away from them is only setting ourselves up for different problems down the timeline.
I don't think he's concerned so much about wildlife, I think the point is just that some cities don't really have anything in particular going for them, aren't worth rebuilding, and should be abandoned like a Western ghost town.
Totally agree, that's a huge part of city planning /permissions to build etc. You can't decide to build on top a mountain and then ask for city water, power, police cruiser patrols etc .
That plan by a former mayor (former NBA great Dave Bing) was hugely unpopular and never launched.
Police and fire in Detroit is hugely difficult because they have a large area to protect that includes numerous ghost neighborhoods. Often a fire is set in an abandoned house and if it's windy spreads to occupied residences.
Despite the difficulty Detroit's current mayor is committed to all the cities neighborhoods. However if you follow the money resources are concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods.
It's far from "government barely existing". They exist in minimal form solely to extract resources from any remaining piece of value in the city. Eg:
"Then earlier this year, he got a letter saying 333 Midland wasn’t up to code and it would have to cease operations immediately. He took care of the minor matters the fire marshall requested, like installing exit signs and extra fire extinguishers. But he still can’t get a clear answer from the building inspector about what else needs to be taken care of"
"But he still can’t get a clear answer from the building inspector about what else needs to be taken care of."
This is local government at its finest. I deal with this on a regular basis. There are regulations with no clear code; when I ask for a specific contract and list of things to do, I get the runaround - but that doesn't stop them from telling me what I am doing with my building structures is not up to code.
I did some research a few years ago and HP had one of the higher revenue streams per capita in the entire state. There's lots of money in the city government, but not a lot of results, which points you toward the underlying problems.
I wonder why there would not be some kind of alternative economic opportunities in that city.
I sense it would be the ideal place to "start over" and build something new in terms of politics and economics.
But when you think about it, a city is such a complex thing, so unless there is money and investment, a poor american city will just stay poor, that seems to fit the law of gravity. Unless you redefine some new way to live in detroit that shortcuts the problems of money, this city will linger.
It's surprising because I really think all the large pool of cash from the silicon valley and its thousands of new alternative ideas could revive detroit. But instead San Francisco is just the antithesis of detroit. That says lengths about the polarized world of today's capitalism.
To be totally honest, I wonder why somebody like Bernie Sanders is not campaigning for mayor or governor other there. It's the ideal place for the left to accomplish things.
I really like how they're routing around a dysfunctional government that is barely functioning. Compared to Detroit that surrounds it Highland Park is the wild, wild west.
East Palo Alto experienced something similar. They voted to incorporate as their own city, then discovered they didn't have a large enough tax base to adequately fund their police department.
At one point in the 1980s they actually achieved the distinction of having the highest murder rate of any city in America.
The problem here is a lack of prudence. When the town was flush with cash from the manufacturing sector, they expanded the budget and became inefficient. When that money left, they still had all of these long-standing inefficient agreements and processes.
Detroit is a well known example of it because they are still trying to uphold these parasitic relationships despite being basically evacuated.
It's not necessarily imprudent or inefficient. It's just a consequence of what happens when you build stuff that needs maintenance. Now, I'm not saying that some of the projects weren't unwisely extravagant, nor that the budget wasn't spent inefficiently and recklessly - but even if it was spent by angels instead of humans, this would still happen.
We can't know the future. So when you need a 5-lane road now, or a major shopping center now, and the history says you'll almost certainly need a 7-lane road and big parking garage in a few years, the prudent thing to do is to build a little more capacity than you need, with the hopes that by the time you maintain it for 20 years and it needs to be replaced or improved again, it's served its purpose well.
Detroit was a seriously happening place half a century ago. There was nothing wrong with creating the buildings, infrastructure, and signing up for the maintenance contracts that those buildings needed at the time. But there was no plan in place for "What happens if all the money disappears and most of the city flees."
Many of the roads and buildings are in surprisingly good shape. Even if they can't do a good, frequent job of plowing the snow off that 7-lane-road in the winter, they're keeping up with it well enough. Pipes, drains, and wires designed to last 20 years are holding together pretty well after 40 years. But they're going to fail eventually, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Should there be a plan, maybe an insurance contract, for demolition if the city can no longer afford a thing? Could there be?
> the public and private sector policy that enabled that evacuation
What do you mean by "enabled"? Are you suggesting the law should force a manufacturing plant to stay in a city, or a person to stay in their apartment? How would that possibly work?
To understand why Detroit and the surrounding region look the way they do today you cannot just chalk everything up to factories closing and the mismanagement of local government. Not to say those aren't important, but the systematically racist policies on the Federal and state level (combined with private sector trends that pushed those policies), especially with regards to housing (e.g. redlining) and transportation (e.g. the freeway system and its destruction of Black neighborhoods), played a huge role in creating the problems the city and region now face.
The area in red is where African Americans and poor Irish lived. No bank would write a mortgage there.
A quote from an article referenced in the link:
“As federal official and leading real estate economist Homer Hoyt explained in 1939: "Usually existing residential structures deteriorate and become obsolete with the passage of time. They are occupied by successive groups of people of lower incomes and lower social standards with the result that the quality of the neighborhood declines with that of the buildings." In the eyes of Hoyt and nearly all other real estate professionals, the presence of non-white residents was prima facie evidence of neighborhood decay and the destruction of property values.”
These ideas were codified in Federal policy and residential lending standards. The legacy of those maps remains today in many places.
Like Detroit it comes down to poor leadership. I remember when Chrysler left. The city needed to go on an extreme diet because the revenue was gone. But instead leaders kept spending, borrowing and postponing the day of reckoning. When it arrived the hole was large.
I would generally consider spending to be profligate if you could not sustain it for a proportional reduction in population (even of an important demographic) with an equal proportional reduction in number of people served.
Or I guess the important matter would be making it so that you only have maybe a few quarters of loss before you can legally adjust services to fit within the budget.
It's really unusual for cities to shrink, let alone drastically, so rapping people on the knuckles for not planning what happens when half your population leaves is a bit disingenuous.
I don't think it's disingenuous to be thinking of how quickly you could terminate non-essential services and staff, and in what order they are cut. You can spend your size, you'd just better be able to downsize quick, whether the economic downturn is global or local, artificial or natural.
City councils seem to think they're in the business of employing people permanently, but they really shouldn't need to be concerned about that, given that the citizens are left to foot the bill, and the majority of them do not work for the local government.
There are parallels in the decline of boomtowns of the Industrial Revolution between the Rust Belt and the Rhine-Ruhr and Northern England, although declining European cities generally saw a lot more investment from their central governments.
More importantly, the European cities didn't experience the same degree of racialized shunning, as described by the Detroit-native urban planner Pete Saunders:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petesaunders1/2017/07/28/detroi...
Most Rust Belt metro areas have seen little population decline from their peak (metro Detroit has lost perhaps 200,000 people even as the city has lost over 1M), and could easily be intact-but-rough-edged cities with cheap housing if there weren't the same dynamic of white flight from the core.
A lot of UK cities suffered 70s/80s economic decline, to the extent that the government was discussing "managed decline" for Liverpool: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-16355281 . Even London suffered a decline in population from ~8m to ~6m.
But somehow I don't think it ever got quite as bad as Detroit. It seems that somehow American politics can just abandon cities, and declare their failure not a problem for the nation or the state.
(Last time I ran the numbers, 80s Detroit was more dangerous than troops-in-the-streets Troubles Belfast, but I don't have it to hand)
Actually, that isn't shown by your link. Your link's Table 1 shows Wealth Shares by percentiles in 10% intervals. This shows a gap of 39% for the US and 53% for Denmark, between the lowest 90% and the top 10% by wealth. Comparing the top 10% to the bottom 10% shows an 82% difference for Denmark and a 70% delta for the US.
The OP wrote, "the wealth gap in the US seems so much bigger than any other country," which is not supported by your link.
The question was specifically about developed countries. If you look up the Wikipedia entry on wealth inequality [1] and sort the first column, looking down the list the USA appears to be the highest ranked country for inequality (ratio of earnings between richest and poorest 10%). Notably China is there, and Mexico and South Africa too, among myriad developing African and Central/South American countries.
Parts of China have some cool stuff. The arts community in Yunnan is a good example. Many sculpture parks, weird spaces, reinvigorated industrial, etc. But gentrifying quickly now, so creativity is waning.
I was thinking something similar. Though rather than a billionaire, some enterprising libertarian / anarcho-capitalist folks could move there and push the city further in that direction by simply using legitimate democratic processes. Sort of like a smaller-scale version of the Free State Project in New Hampshire. Though maybe a billionaire could provide some seed funding to induce the initial migration.
Dearborn and Detroit both either barely have a government or the government has ceded power to private groups. Corruption and constitutional protections have largely gone out the window.
It's not even close to a comparison with "Galt's Gulch." It could be, but the prime movers aren't there. Historically, it actually shows the opposite of such a place.
I'm living where I am because I'm in an awesome city (Ann Arbor), and that includes a good social network, yes. You couldn't pay me to live in Detroit.
[1]http://www.miufi.org/ [2]http://thehinterlandsensemble.org/ [3]http://www.puppetart.org/ [4]http://tangentgallery.com/Tangent_Gallery/Home.html