The community nearly surrounded by Detroit is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because it cannot pay its bills to the utility providing drinking water and sewage services to a city that was once a thriving auto manufacturing town
HIGHLAND PARK, Mich. (AP) — Kevin Houston scanned the Michigan street where his fixer-upper and older homes bridge gaps between the vacant, overgrown lots and abandoned, ramshackle houses, boarded-up businesses and potholed streets of Highland Park.
“It’s not a bad place to live,” Houston said. “It’s not the best.”
The community nearly surrounded by Detroit is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because it cannot pay its bills to the utility providing drinking water and sewage services to a city that was once a thriving auto manufacturing town. It serves as an example of blue collar cities that lost their way amid changes to manufacturing and are now shells of their past, plagued by neighborhood malaise, neglect and deep poverty.
Over 50,000 people lived there in 1930. Homes — elegant and spacious — rivaled some of those built in Detroit. The city is just under 3 square miles (7.8 square kilometers) and is a shell of its auto baron past, when manufacturing boomed and money flowed. Fewer than 9,000 now call it home. The auto companies are long gone, leaving strip malls and retail shops to bolster the city’s dwindling business tax base.
And, owing about $20 million to a regional water service, Highland Park is considering municipal bankruptcy — a strategy that a decade ago today!
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