Big-city Democrats are repeating the mistakes that killed Detroit

I grew up in Detroit — actually just six blocks outside it, in a small blue-collar town whose name you wouldn’t recognize. Detroit was at rock bottom for most of my childhood. Its downtown has since made a minor economic comeback, if only because there is a certain point from which there is nowhere to go but up.

But the blueprint for that once-great city’s destruction is written all over the still-abandoned skyscrapers that surround the new stadiums and the vacant square miles of overgrown grasslands that once bustled with houses and families. The old flourishing metropolis that was America’s fifth-largest city, with more than 1.8 million residents, was buried under passivity against crime, the collapse of public education and indifference toward economic realities.

Frighteningly, these maladies of a bygone America have returned in force as tenets of the progressive Left from coast to coast.

Nearly all major U.S. cities are governed by Democrats — most of them almost exclusively by Democrats for at least 20 years. What are the results? Would you send your kids to the public schools in those places? Would you open a business there? Would you even go there for dinner? 

If you wanted to destroy once-great American cities, what would you do differently from what the Democrats who govern them are doing now?

These are not frivolous or purely ideological questions. For example, in D.C., there were 79 carjackings last month — apparently a monthly record — compared to just eight carjackings in April 2019. The District Council reacted to spike in carjackings by voting to reduce the penalty for carjacking, even doubling down and overriding the mayor’s veto.

And I don’t mean to pick on D.C. New York City subway crime rose 30 percent in 2022.  Businesses and residents are fleeing even beautiful cities such as Portland, Ore. and Seattle because their crime and homelessness problems are out of control.

So that big city you love — the one you visited on excursions growing up — just isn’t the same place as it was when you visited a couple of years ago for that baseball game. You might not want to go back there now, or at least not to bring your children.

The latest trend is for even posh downtown areas, such as Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, to experience “teen takeovers” — a new euphemism for senseless riots and looting by delinquents who are assumed to be juveniles, although few are ever arrested to confirm that. 

This, like many of the other crime trends in big cities, is a result of prosecutors refusing to attach serious consequences to crime. It turns out that criminals are really, really good at figuring out just how far they can push things without facing consequences. They show their ingenuity every time a big city D.A. decides to tolerate shoplifting, abolishes sentencing enhancements for gun crimes and gang membership, declines to jail chronic bond violators, or fails to press charges even against career criminals accused of violent crimes.

And the current spike in crime is occurring amid record vacancies on urban police forces. Chicago reportedly lost 19% of its police force under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D), and the exodus will likely continue under her defund-the-police successor. 

Washington D.C. has lost two sworn officers for every new officer it has hired since October 2020, for a net loss of nearly 12% of the entire force during that period. And it stands to reason — who would even consider taking such a stressful, low-paying job in a city where the political class is so eager to throw you under the bus? 

As for the educational collapse from which Detroit has never recovered, that is being repeated, too. Maryland, where I now live, is ranked as the second most-educated state, according to a recent study by WalletHub. Yet its principal city, Baltimore, has 23 public schools where not a single student — not even one in the whole school — tests proficient for math at grade level. Even worse, Baltimore has almost the same number of public schools that just barely missed that list because one or two of the students attending — out of the entire school — can do basic math. 

Maryland’s Democrat-controlled government reacted to this news by moving to cut funding for a modest private school voucher program established by the former Republican governor, which might have given at least a few children a path out of school systems that haven’t improved in a lifetime and probably never will.

Conservatives and Republicans did not cause the problems these cities are facing. They didn’t have a chance — Democrats have dominated all of these jurisdictions for decades. There is no Republican mayor of Portland or Seattle or Los Angeles or Chicago or Baltimore to point the finger at.

New York has gotten worse lately, but it still isn’t in quite as bad shape as some of the others. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that the Big Apple recently enjoyed a 20-year period without a Democrat as mayor. But give it time — sadly, it is well on its way.

America’s big cities are extremely sick right now. Their illness will keep getting worse as long as voters keep electing people who follow the same failed policies.

Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).