I was born in Detroit and grew up in the nearby suburb of Wayne. I can tell you the main reason why there’s a much smaller homeless problem in Motown, a nickname for Detroit: You will freeze to death. It’s not quite as bad as during the “global cooling” of the 1970s, when it got down to 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and parts on my car froze. But sub-zero weather is guaranteed starting every November.
More Housing
The L.A. Times article also mentions the second reason (but not “mostly”): “Like many of those places, Detroit doesn’t have L.A. levels of street homelessness mostly because it has more available housing.“Detroit’s flawed and somewhat accidental solution, a city rich in cheap housing and abandoned buildings, is hardly ideal. People like McFarland are often stuck in neighborhoods where they feel unsafe. Many of the homes people live in are falling apart, run by slumlords. But their availability points toward the most basic approach to getting people off the streets: finding more places to live.”
That also misrepresents what happened. It wasn’t “accidental.” The city was wrecked on purpose through bad policies similar to those wrecking Los Angeles and California today. The major difference is California has an intrinsic value as a coastal city in the state’s balmy Mediterranean climate. Detroit does not. It does have beautiful lakes and beaches. But in the winter, they’re good only for ice fishing.
I was born there in 1955 and remember driving to my grandparents’ home on the East Side of Detroit through 1974, when the last one, Grandpa Seiler, died. Through the early 1960s, it was a beautiful city, called the Paris of the West. Just about anybody, of any race, creed, or color, could earn a good living in the auto industry. But by the mid-1970s, the city was in the midst of being destroyed, although the suburbs still prospered.
Here’s what happened.
‘Rich Men North of Richmond’
The current hit song by country crooner Oliver Anthony, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” talks about how the wealthy politicians, lobbyists, and government functionaries in the Washington, D.C. beltway north of Richmond, Va., are controlling our lives and robbing our livelihoods. Here’s the list of the 10 most wealthy counties in America, according to U.S. News, by median household income in 2022:1. Loudoun County, Virginia — $156,821 2. Falls Church, Virginia — $155,071 3. Santa Clara County, California — $140,258 4. San Mateo County, California — $136,837 5. Fairfax County, Virginia — $133,974 6. Marin County, California — $131,008 7. Howard County, Maryland — $129,549 8. Arlington County, Virginia — $128,145 9. Douglas County, Colorado — $127,433 10. Nassau County, New York — $126,576
Notice the top two, and five of the top 10, are Virginia or Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.—the Rich Parasites North of Richmond. That’s where your tax dollars go. Three other counties are, as you would expect, in California’s Bay Area, where the global tech industry is located. Another is Douglas County, Colo. A relative of mine used to live there. It’s “horse country,” where the state’s rich frolic. Nassau County in New York is just east of New York City, still the world’s financial capital.
- Oakland County — $86,275
- Macomb County — $67,828
Macomb’s is even less, 43 percent of Loudon’s.
- Loudon County — $6,268
- Falls Church — $12,585
- Santa Clara County — $11,534
- San Mateo County — $12,063
- Fairfax County — $14,854
- Marin County — $6,724
- Howard County — $12,904
- Arlington County — $11,486
- Douglas County — $10,209
- Nassau County — $13,859
- Oakland County - $13,033, second only to Fairfax County near D.C. and Nassau County in New York
- Macomb County - $12,569, also close to the others on the list
- Wayne County - $10,098, quite high for a working-class county; auto workers made great money
What happened is President Johnson’s Great Society giveaway programs of the 1960s, which were supposed to reduce poverty and instead shifted trillions of dollars from the productive areas of the economy, such as Detroit and its suburbs, to Washington, D.C. and its suburbs. The anti-poverty programs themselves instead brought massive poverty as the federal government metastasized first inside the D.C. Beltway, then around it.
Multiply these comparisons across the country, including California, and you can see why so many problems originate from the money made in real industries—autos, steel, computers, construction—being taxed away and sent to the paper-pushers, taxers, and over-regulators in Washington and its environs.
High State Taxes
Let’s go further. After all, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida are doing better than Michigan and California. Well, those states don’t have a state income tax. California’s, of course, is 13.3 percent at the top level.“Since that year, Michigan has lost nearly 40 percent of its share of national population and nearly 50 percent of its share of national income. ...
“It is a myth that manufacturing in the United States declined in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. The permanent slouching of manufacturing came with the Barack Obama presidency. Manufacturing did great over the first forty years of the Michigan income tax. It did great in nice part by leaving Michigan and going to other places, like zero-income-tax Tennessee.”
Detroit’s combined income tax rate is 6.65 percent. Which means if you just move out of Detroit to a nice suburb, you enjoy a 2.4 percentage-point tax cut.
Housing Costs
On the positive side for Detroit, as the L.A. Times article notes, housing is dirt cheap. According to Zillow, the median home price in Motown is $67,745. In the City of Angels, it’s $907,874—13 times as much. Median rent in Detroit is $1,212 (798 square feet), compared to $2,742 in Los Angeles (788 square feet), 2.3 times as much. And the square footage in Detroit is slightly larger. However, spending a winter snowed into a small apartment in a Michigan winter is much less pleasant than enjoying open-air Los Angeles.Comparisons go only so far, but can be useful. Los Angeles is not Detroit on the Pacific. Somebody scraping by on a minimal income can still make it in Detroit. Not so in Los Angeles. The massive federal and state taxation in both states is pushing businesses and jobs to more hospitable states.
As for the homeless, Los Angeles’s weather, generous public benefits, and lax policing are always going to be preferable to hunkering down in a crumbling old building during a Detroit winter, with the wind howling at the door and the snow swirling through the cracks in the walls.
