are you going to move there? if i didn t have kids i would move there. if you have had any desire to get into urban farming, move to detroit. there s plenty of land, the people are so infectious. i enjoyed my time there. it was like surveying a war zone populated by saints. if you want to raise chickens and bees, detroit is the bees knees. thank you, kennedy. next, a man who has a plan to rescue detroit. his version by turning part of it into a free market paradise away from the reach of government. is that even possible? 49 years later, it s become the midwest tiger, rifling hong kong and singapore. all business purchases. so you can capture your receipts,
move to the try. is plenty of land. the people are so infectious. i enjoyed my time. it was like surveying a war zone populated by st. really awesome, abandon banding together. detroit is the bee s knees. john: thank you. next, a man who has a plan to rescue detroit. his version, turning part of it into a of free-market paradise away from the reach of government. is that even possible? you know throughout history, folks have suffered from frequent heartburn.
basic city services, police, electricity, having your water run, things like that, they need to be provided for anyone to live here. who is going to live in a city if you don t provide those basic services? but the city is so burdened with past debt, pension debt, and things that it hasn t paid off for decades and decades that it is basically having to hold on one hand the people who are owed money, some of whom live here and are people with pensions that have been promised or promised for the future, versus the people who are living here now, the 700,000 citizens, and their future, because we can t provide the basic things that you just said. who is going to live in the city? we shrunk from 2 million plus city to 700,000, but we re still built for 2 million. like somebody with an oversized coat on all the time and having to pay for all the services for a city that doesn t support it with the number of people. so we need to sort of clear the table and start over again. this is going to
it didn t just happen. it has been, as they re saying around here, 60 years in the making. and i right now we re not hearing anybody saying, oh, good, washington will bail us out. bankruptcy is a serious thing and we re taking it very seriously around here. and, you know, i want to go through some of the numbers. i know, mitch, you know them, some viewers may know them of. but they take my breath away. the city s population plunged 62% since those great days right back in 1950. so obviously the tax base has gone away. and as a result, the city is in dire straits. when i read through the bankruptcy filing, i had to read about 58 minute wait for the police to show up, versus an 11-minute wait across this country. 40% of the streetlights don t work. 78,000 of the properties in detroit are abandoned. and it has the highest homicide rate in 40 years. and there were a lot of other bad things in there, right, like only a third of the emergency vehicles actually are even operational. rig
well, we re not atlantis. and cities do change and this city can change too. and the biggest currency of the city is not its factories and not what it happens to make at any given time in history. it is the people. and i m concerned you re dealing and obviously it look like we just lost the signal there for mitch. we ll see if we can get that back. but just a pretty amazing thing. and i think just worthwhile to mention that you have people like mitch albom who live in detroit, who lived there for three decades, and believe so passionately in the future and have a view of this city that is optimistic and bright in some ways, so different than what you read in the bankruptcy filings or what so many of us read around the country. and worth just to think about that and remember that when you have conversations over the weekend about whether detroit should be saved. still to come, the 16-year-old who was run over by emergency vehicles following the crash of the 777 in san francisco.