How To Save a Dying City in 4 Steps
Detroit and Chicago are models of urban failure.
The decline of both cities visibly began around 1960. That was when a decade of Democratic control merged with the federal government to turn these cities into welfare state disasters.
This had begun in the New Deal. But it took a quarter century for the process to begin to become visible. Whites began moving out. The suburbs continued to grow.
James Curley of Boston had begun this process even earlier. He was the model for the mayor in the novel and 1958 movie, The Last Hurrah. Tax by tax, he penalized the productive middle class. They started leaving.
School districts would make available the following option to fired teachers with contractual tenure. They would get a severance pay bonus of $50,000 for putting their classroom courses on the school district’s free education website. These videos would be hosted free on YouTube. This costs the districts nothing. Districts would pay for a full-time webmaster for the district’s courses. This could easily be paid for from the proceeds of the sale of surplus public school campuses.
These videos would allow comments. There would be Facebook “likes.” Word would get out fast: like vs. dislike. Parents could choose which teachers are best.
Voters would also see how incompetent most of the former teachers were.
There would be thousands of courses online for free, as school districts and cities close schools and fire teachers.
Word will get out. Two-dozen teachers nationally in each course will get half of the students. They will get rich by selling workbooks, updated videos, and so forth. They will be superstars. Districts will court them, the way that universities pay $250,000 a year to superstar professors.
Without high-cost schools to pay for, city costs would drop. Without pensions to pay for, the second-largest cost would go away. Taxes would be tied to market property values.
The middle class would stay. The cities would grow. They would not get cheaper to live in, but jobs would multiply. Taxes would not eat up families’ futures.
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