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The poster is confusing the amount of insolvency with the value of Detroit. The value of the city far exceeds the valuation of Google.
by jpdoctor 13y ago
The poster is confusing the amount of insolvency with the value of Detroit. The value of the city far exceeds the valuation of Google.
- glanch 13y agoWell to be fair, he does use the phrase "bail out" in the post, so maybe he means that if Google threw $20bn at Detroit, they'd earn enough political capital to push some of these ideas through. Although it seems more likely that such a move would create an adversarial relationship between Google and the citizens of Detroit, especially given the troubles Google and Ann Arbor are having, as referenced by another user in this thread.
- tomkarlo 13y agoThe poster's confused, but I'm not sure it's necessarily true that the city of Detroit should have a value that's greater than zero. If the current cost of paying pensions and the cost of maintaining (underused) infrastructure is much larger than the expected tax base, than the value of the city (not including private property) could well be negative. That said, it's unlikely that's true, because there's still a lot of option value available if someone's willing to make hard decisions and/or shed some costs through bankruptcy. (But it's going to be really unpopular, like not paying pensions or simply shutting down city services to certain neighborhoods.) America doesn't really have a model for shrinking city infrastructure. Detroit is the first test of what happens when a major modern city stops growing and starts shrinking in a long-term way. It's hard to scale down government and infrastructure in a smooth way.