I dunno if the system is broken to be honest - and I don't think it's incompetence that's the problem here. I don't believe a lot of people in City Government honestly care about fixing the problem.
I don't think the city representing all of it's citizens expressing their power to try and have services provided equitably to all it's citizens throughout the city is stupid.
Sure they are not market driven and screw up the economics for the company. But if you look at what tools the city has available then most of that stupid becomes an understandable compromise.
I'm not sure I agree that this is /wrong/ per se - the issue arises from the city council's disinterest / lack of expertise (which itself comes from disinterest) in these systems. If the issues are disclosed clearly, and the city council continues to sign off on the implementation (due to disinterest, cost pressure, whatever) without consulting knowledgeable third parties, then it's only realistic that the blame falls on the ultimate decision-maker (in this case, the city council).
The most frustrating part about the conversation is that politics takes away the fundamental fact that what is happening in the city is not normal and there is no one else to blame for it other than the city officials, not the pandemic, not the wfh tech workers, just the city.
And here is the really shocking part, if the local government wanted to clean it up and fix the problem, it could but it just does not have the willpower to do do. This is not the Apocalypse, it just local government sucking at its job.
Most of the other problems, the ones which I agree are not direct responsibilities of the mayor and council, have grown as symptoms of those failing city services.
If you can't get your street plowed or your trash picked up, you move. If your kid isn't safe walking to, or being in school, you move. If there are no jobs in the city, you move.
The more people move, the less revenue the city gets, the more blight it acquires, the less incentive businesses have to stay in the city. Then they move. The blight accelerates and exacerbates the problem of keeping those places from becoming havens for criminals, drug dealers and vandals.
Did you know there isn't a single grocery store chain in the city of Detroit? Yeah, the Eastern market and a few community gardens are stepping up to fill the void for their neighbors. But even with those, there remains a very real and serious protein problem that's only solved by leaving the city.
So, is the city directly responsible for things like the unemployment rate and drop-out rate? No. But year after year after year they've ignored these problems. Refused change. Literally shouted down people who have raised these issues at council meetings. Let their hatred, bigotry, sense of entitlement and corruption waylay any and every attempt to turn things around.
So, no. They're not directly responsible for kids dropping out. They are however responsible for having essentially ignored the problems in schools for the last few decades as the graduation rate has sunk to 25%. They are responsible for being so incredibly inept that the entire system was taken over by the State.
If I'm responsible for a division of programmers and our output is so consistently bad that higher-management needs to step in and address the problems - while it may not have been my personal responsibility to get code written, clearly I've not been doing a good job.
you may be right. would be curious to see polling numbers.
my reaction is perhaps a little overheated, but it's frustrating to see a city that is completely inept at solving its many real problems so quickly and effecively squash something that is at worst a minor inconvenience and at best actually a signifcant boon.
Correct. The amount of money the city had to throw at these problems shows how the American way of spending their way to solutions isn’t enough. There’s zero attempt at being thoughtful and recognize what’s working (and why) — instead everything is a ballot initiative that’s voted on emotionally.
It’s a total lack of leadership and quality of governance, which to me stems largely from years of capitalism mixed with reductions in government which has created a super powerful and motivated global private sector, and no civic pride and reasonable reward for those capable individuals to work for the public.
We need to find a way to get our superstars in power, and not necessarily at the top only. We need a capable, civic-minded, and results-focused class of doer powering government. When the wage gap is 3-10x between private and public, and no culture of pride and civic engagement, this is what happens.
My claim is that's because you don't pay any attention to what your city government does and so you only notice when they mess up. But never when they don't.
Those are not serious or widespread problems. Other cities manage to make do with cheaper options. This is just another case of lazy, overpaid government employees trying to justify their jobs.
I feel like that article has just strung together every negative complaint you can find on Reddit. With a few "but it's not all bad" anecdotes for some sort of balance.
Personally I feel the larger problem is the mostly invisible city workers and non-profits that are constantly sidelined by the visible elected officials. There are a great many projects slowing making an impact. But they often lose funding or support once someone has finished using them for some Twitter/photo op.
Pet projects are the norm, feels like no one wants to do the hard work to reform processes in place that allow for deadlock :(
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