A Vision of the Future

From the Chicago Tribune: Detroit's outlook falls along with home prices.

It may be tough to get financing for a new car these days, but in Detroit you can buy a house with a credit card.

The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service.

Not $75,000. Remove a zero—it's seven thousand five hundred dollars, substantially less than the lowest-price car on the new-car market.

Among the many dispiriting numbers that bleakly depict the decrepitude of this onetime industrial behemoth, the steep slide of housing values helps define the daunting challenge to anyone who wants to lead this shrinking, poverty-pocked city of about 800,000 people.

Detroit, which has lost half its population in the past 50 years, is deceptively large, covering 139 square miles. Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston could, as a group, fit inside the city's boundaries. There is no major grocery chain in the city, and only two movie theaters. Much of the neighborhood economy revolves around rib joints, hot dog stands and liquor stores.

The problem is more than a $300 million budget shortfall, said John Mogk, a professor at Wayne State University Law School.

"A thousand people are leaving the city every month," Mogk said, "and the city does not have the financial resources and the economic base to solve its own problems."

This is pretty much the future of Cleveland and all the remaining second-tier Rust Belt cities.