A California city that filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after a developer secured a $10 million judgment against it, Desert Hot Springs was featured in the NYT for its fiscal troubles. The city, Desert Hot Springs, population 27,000, is slowly edging toward bankruptcy, largely because of police salaries and skyrocketing pension costs, but also because…
Category: Austerity
What Washington Gives New York – Added Strain on the Social Safety Net – NYTimes.com
New York City’s commitment to preserving a social safety net is quietly heroic. When the federal government began slashing last March, officials with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development drained their reserves to keep building housing. They also preserved the rental vouchers that stand between tens of thousands of Lucy Delgados and homelessness. But…
More than one way for a city to die
There has been a lot of press lately, nationally and locally, about the skyrocketing cost of living and doing business in San Francisco. While all that money keeps the city in better fiscal shape than most places in the U.S., it doesn’t necessarily improve the quality of life for San Franciscans. In fact, it kills…
Report: Detroit bankruptcy caused by state cuts, shrinking tax base, not long-term debt | Detroit Free Press | freep.com
While we wait for the federal judge to rule on Detroit’s petition for bankruptcy, a Demos report enters the fray: WASHINGTON — A New York-based think tank released a report today questioning Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s assertion that the city’s long-term debt is responsible for its fiscal problems, or that pension contributions are at…
Peter Marcuse on Participatory Budgeting
I’ve just discovered Peter Marcuse’s blog on critical planning, and the post at the top is on participatory budgeting. Marcuse’s 1981 article “The targeted crisis: on the ideology of the urban fiscal crisis and its uses” has been instrumental in framing my dissertation, so I’m excited to see that he’s turning his attention to city…