Anyone who has read the news over the past month knows about the dire situation in Japan and another unrelated mess that is Detroit. However no one has yet to merge the two disasters and thus create a win-win solution for the vast majority of people in both areas.
Japan needs to permanently relocate hundreds of thousands of people who formerly lived in and around the coastal city of Sendai due to the 9.0 Magnitude earthquake and related tsunami. Another large resettlement issue is a result of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster in the same area. A significant part of Japan may not be habitable for decades or even longer.
Japan itself is a small nation where space is a premium and its cities are already densely populated. Japan expects to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding cities and infrastructure yet some areas cannot be resettled or rebuilt at all because of the high levels of radiation from the serious damage to various nuclear reactors at the same Fukushima coastal site.
Detroit really needs a massive influx of people and new businesses to replace the 1.1 million people who left the city since 1950. Since 2000, it lost 25% of its population so it now has a little over 700,000 residents according to the 2010 census. This huge population loss has dropped it out of the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. for the first time in 60 years and it is back to its 1910 population just before the Automobile age. Detroit is still a city rich in underground infrastructure (water and sewer systems, electric grid, gas lines, and other communication utilities), plus lots of vacant land immediately above that infrastructure. It also has a vast network of roads, highways and railroads within the city limits that have been neglected for many years.
Most importantly Detroit lies next to the world largest source of clean fresh water: The Great Lakes. It is also located far from any major earthquake zones, tsunami regions, or can be threatened by any hurricanes. It is not even a snow-belt city. Tornados are a fact of life for most U.S. states in the Midwest and around the Great Lakes but most large cities such as Detroit rarely see them within their municipal borders.
Detroit is surrounded by tens of million of people in two advanced nations (the U.S. & Canada). Many unemployed Americans in SE Michigan will never see any new jobs or opportunities without a complete change of national policy and a huge infusion of investment capital and people, all of which are highly unlikely without adopting a completely new way of thinking.
Detroit also contains a great art museum and symphony orchestra, plus a decent professional baseball team playing in an all-new downtown ball park – three very valuable cultural amenities to many Japanese. It has a large international airport and the State of Michigan is interested in developing the existing snail-rail Amtrak line to Chicago into a high-speed train line – something the Japanese already know how to do very well.
Despite Detroit’s many assets, the unspoken dirty secret in the U.S. and the State of Michigan has been to simply write-off the city. There have been endless hand-wringing, studies, and proposals from various public and private entities across the nation on how to save or rebuild the city. However, no one in the U.S. has much need for, or the willingness to invest much public and private capital in Detroit. We are watching a relentless and steady abandonment of a large American city while hoping no one really notices because our many other national and regional problems are much bigger and even more costly to address.
The best humanitarian, social, and economic assistance the U.S. could provide to Japan is to convert the entire city of Detroit into an quasi-independent and international free-trade zone with the Japanese given special investment, ownership and immigration privileges. Alternatively, an outright sale of the city to Japan would also make sense. Japan could resettle over a million people, build new homes, schools and infrastructure, plus set up many businesses and high-tech factories – in a new Detroit, and they would be very close geographically to many of their best business customers. With the price of oil going up, that would be a massive savings in transportation costs.
By turning Detroit into an international city under Japanese control and principle ownership, the new residents could maintain their culture and language while also learning American/Canadian English. Many signs in Japan include English translations so this would not be so difficult. If most abandoned parcels of land in Detroit can be purchased for the price of an iPod, the wholesale buy-up of the city by Japan would be a financial bargain in comparison to dealing with over-priced Japanese real estate and cleaning up after a major nuclear disaster.
If the U.S. and the rest of Michigan have no need for the city of Detroit, why not give it over to people from an advanced and wealthy nation, who desperately need to start new lives? Under the International city and free trade designation (or outright Japanese annexation) Detroit could be completely rebuilt and repopulated within a decade, albeit with a strong Japanese flavor.
The establishment of this new Detroit would protect the rights of any U.S. citizen or legal resident to also move to or work in Detroit. (English would be retained as one of the official languages.) The major cultural change would be that many Americans returning to the city would likely be part of a minority among a Japanese majority instead of being a minority among its overwhelmingly poor and black population today. Often people moving to various cities in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas find themselves in locations with a majority Spanish-speaking population. How would that be different in a Japanese Detroit?
If Japan does well in rebuilding Detroit for their own benefit, then we might consider making other decaying and dying U.S. cities into special international free-trade zones that favor investments from overseas (or transferring them to outright foreign ownership). Municipal and business corporations are just legal fictions that now have many of the best rights formerly held exclusively by human beings. Who or what legal entity actually owns real estate or runs any public or private enterprise is really irrelevant in the 21st century. A group of Spanish and Australian investors now own and operate the Indiana Turnpike (I-80/90). For those who advocate public-private partnerships and privatization of public assets, this would be just what the doctor ordered.
Cleveland and Buffalo come immediately to mind as next in line for such creative rebranding and rebuilding. Would Cleveland again prosper if it became a new Germanic province called “West” Deutschland? Even some of Cleveland’s declining inner-ring suburbs such as Lakewood and Shaker Heights could be thrown into a foreign sale. It would be a reasonable argument that German law and new investors might be superior to what’s left of dysfunctional government and stingy banks in Northeast Ohio.
Those Americans who oppose open borders and the lack of a coherent U.S. immigration policy would find this type of controlled immigration and investment policies much more palatable. New foreign residents would be limited to settling in places Americans have generally abandoned. Yet Americans would still retain the right to live and work in these new special foreign-controlled enclaves.
Detroit and its residents would probably prefer living in a place that looks more like Tokyo or Hong Kong in 10 to 20 years, rather than disappearing completely as many ancient cities have done such as the Greco-Roman City of Corinth. Many U.S. communities are significantly dependent upon foreign-owned or multi-national private corporations for their existence, and they fear the outsourcing of valuable jobs at any time. How much different would it be to have specific U.S. municipalities be wholly owned and controlled by foreign interests? At least there would be strong legal and financial reasons to invest in those American cities. If we ever needed to abandon outdated nationalistic jingoism, it’s now.
To still cling to the delusion that the U.S. has the desire or financial capital to rebuild Detroit and other dying American cities is not realistic in light of America’s stunning and rapid global decline. The only viable solution left for the U.S. is to sell off these cities to far wealthier nations and private entities that could actually use them to their full potential. That would be a true global win-win result.
Submitted 3/30/11 by Marc Pascal from Phoenix, AZ.