Detroit’s Municipal Bankruptcy: Racialised Geographies of Austerity

Phinney, Sawyer

doi:10.1080/13563467.2017.1417371

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…City officials may be especially wary of programs that appear to redistribute the cost of municipal services to middle and upperincome residents at a time when the city's administration promises to increase the city's population and economic base (Dolan, 2014;Ferretti, 2018b). Hence the case of PTE implementation in Detroit lends broader insight into how the politics of urban austerity are realized in municipalities and how the costs of fiscal retrenchment are borne by low-income groups (Phinney, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘It’s like they make it difficult for you on purpose’: barriers to property tax relief and foreclosure prevention in Detroit, Michigan

2019

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All U.S. states permit local governments to recover unpaid property taxes through a tax lien foreclosure process. Tax relief policies can reduce household tax burdens and prevent the foreclosure of owner-occupied homes, but little is known about their use and effectiveness. Like other cities, Detroit, Michigan, experienced a rise in tax foreclosures following the 2008 deep recession. Michigan law requires cities to exempt low-income homeowners from some or all of their property tax obligation. Implementation of this policy, the Poverty Tax Exemption, nevertheless failed to protect many low-income homeowners from dispossession through tax foreclosure. State-mandated and locally-determined procedures placed the burden of learning about and applying for the exemption on financially stressed homeowners, restricting widespread access to this critical tax relief. Eliminating institutional barriers to tax relief can prevent many owner-occupied tax foreclosures, especially in cities where a high need for tax relief occurs under local conditions of fiscal austerity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘It’s like they make it difficult for you on purpose’: barriers to property tax relief and foreclosure prevention in Detroit, Michigan

2019

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“…These emergency managers are tasked with imposing austerity conditions onto cities and residents in order to avoid municipal default, thereby serving as a tool of the capitalist state to protect the interests of finance capital. Emergency management has disproportionately been placed on majority-Black cities in Michigan (Lee et al, 2016), such as Detroit, reflecting the racialized operations of finance and public debt (Phinney, 2018; Ponder and Omstedt, 2019). When Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, was appointed, addressing the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s debt became a top priority.…”

Section: Detroit’s Water Shutoffs As a Social Reproduction Strugglementioning

confidence: 99%

The politics of owing: Accounting, water disconnection, and austerity urbanism in Detroit

Heil

2022

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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With the rise of austerity urbanism, contemporary urban governance has been described as “rule by accountancy.” Yet the intricacies of accounting practice have been underexplored in the austerity urbanism literature. Drawing on insights from critical accounting studies, I interrogate accounting practices as political exercises that draw people and institutions into ties of obligation (accountability), shape social relations, and structure the conditions of urban life. Through this lens, practices of accounting can be understood not just as a technocratic tool of the financialized state, but as a contested terrain of urban political struggle. Examining the case of austerity-driven water service disconnections in Detroit, this paper chronicles how accounting practices are both deployed by the state to justify water disconnection and used by activists seeking to expand water access in unprecedented ways. I find that while the austerity urbanism literature is correct to identify accounting as a tool in the advancement of the austerity agenda, accounting is also a means to organize against the diminished expectations of life under austerity.

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“…As highlighted in a letter from three US senators to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, the discrepancy in the Fed's support for private and public financial markets meant that "giant corporations will reap all the benefits of this recovery while cities and states are left behind and suffer needless economic devastation" (Warren et al, 2020: 1)-likely in ways that will accelerate racial disparities. Here the critical urban geographic approach of linking the production of space, with its attendant racialized, classed, and gendered dynamics, to the underlying structures of capitalism is a powerful guide to what is at stake in understanding the public-private interface, reminding us who is most harmed by austerity, and how state and local governments have historically made up for reduced revenue shortfalls through pecuniary measures like traffic fines (US Department of Justice, 2015: 1) or more extreme measures such as switching the municipal water source to a contaminated river (Pulido, 2016) or shutting off the water supply to impoverished households altogether (Phinney, 2018).…”

Section: Infrastructure and Municipal Liquidity: The Public-private Financial Interface At The Local Scalementioning

confidence: 99%

Reimagining geographies of public finance

August

Cohen

Danyluk

et al. 2021

Progress in Human Geography

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The study of public finance—the role of government in the economy—has faded in geography as attention to private finance has grown. Disrupting the tendency to fetishize private financial power, this article proposes an expanded conception of public finance that emphasizes its role in shaping geographies of inequality. We conceptualize the relationship between public and private finance as a dynamic interface characterized today by asymmetrical power relations, path-dependent policy solutions, the depoliticization of markets, and uneven distributional effects. A reimagined theory and praxis of public finance can contribute to building abolitionist futures, and geographers are well positioned to advance this project.

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Detroit’s Municipal Bankruptcy: Racialised Geographies of Austerity

Cited by 15 publications

References 12 publications

‘It’s like they make it difficult for you on purpose’: barriers to property tax relief and foreclosure prevention in Detroit, Michigan

‘It’s like they make it difficult for you on purpose’: barriers to property tax relief and foreclosure prevention in Detroit, Michigan

The politics of owing: Accounting, water disconnection, and austerity urbanism in Detroit

Reimagining geographies of public finance

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