Neoliberalizing Detroit

"It's there for the taking." That is how Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute described Detroit in the summer of 2013, as the city tumbled inexorably towards what would be the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history. It was a flippant remark that spoke volumes about the conservative movement's strategic line on the still-unfolding financial crisis that had been enveloping cities across the country in the years since the Wall Street crash of 2008. And it also represented a blunt summary of the ideologically consistent but in practice continuously evolving position of the Manhattan Institute, a New York-based think tank that since the late 1970s has been at the forefront of the development of a distinctively neoliberal approach to urban policy, including workfare, zero-tolerance policing, and a pro-corporate development ethos. "The depth of corruption and dysfunction [in Detroit] is so fantastic," Siegel continued, "it's so far that you might describe it as Third World dysfunction. There is no need [for conservatives] to gin it up. It's just right there" (quoted in Gold 2013, p. 2). The financial travails of Detroit would be an opportunity for conservative intellectuals and opinion shapers to rail, once again, against the poisonous legacy of New Deal urbanism, and to repurpose their parables of welfare dependency and governmental failure, this time to frame and facilitate a first-world model for financially mandated structural adjustment at the urban scale. Detroit was going to have to pay the price for what Siegel's Manhattan Institute colleague Steven Malanga (2013a, p. A13) pointedly described on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page as "tin-cup urbanism."