CityNerd's Latest Video about my City is Amazing and Very Illuminating. Posting about it here because I got some Info and Context to Share
The basic gist of what CityNerd talks about in his video is this whitepaper "Taxbase Fragmentation as a Dimension of Metropolitan Inequality", or, how smaller, further out Towns/Suburbs often act as a financial outpost that deprives inner Cities and older Suburbs from having any resources for combating legacy costs and other Socioecopolitical issues.
CityNerd disclosed in the beginning of his video that he was influenced to create one on this subject not just because of a post that was sent to him by U of M Sociology Professor Robert Manduca proposing it to him (he also co-wrote the whitepaper), but also, right about 0:46 he admits that he's had thought of creating such a video and looking at related sources "for a while now".
I take this to mean that CityNerd has finally come around to the idea of Metropolitan Governments (here's a post that I made 8 months ago about the topic being published in Business Insider) seeing as all the data collected within his vid points towards similar justifications advocates like myself use in order to advance awareness for them.
Anyways, in no great shock to me, or, to anybody who is familiar with the ins and outs of advocating for a Metropolitan Government, according to the scale that was born from the whitepaper (https://www.taxbasefragmentation.net/), the notorious Rust Belt region of Metro Detroit ranks as the region with the MOST geographically fragmented taxbase while the City-County of Honolulu ranked as the least fragmented, owing to it's municipal merger in 1907.
Here's some things that stood out to me while using the dataset:
The only two places within Metro Detroit that don't have any data that'd help us to have a complete picture of the region are Dearborn and Taylor. which is disappointing since Dearborn is a major population and jobs hub while Taylor is yet another industrial working class type of place, would be interested in knowing why they aren't included in the dataset.
Of the 20 municipalities that directly border the City of Detroit, only 6 had "Fiscal Capacity Ratios" (FCRs) (whitepaper lays out all the math, for you nerds who actually like numbers) above the bare minimum rating of 1.0. Meaning that only six Cities have the ability to use their taxbases to improve QOL concerns, barely.
Within the 9 communities located in Southeast Oakland County, along the Woodward Corridor, the places doing well on the FCR ratings (Berkley, Royal Oak, Ferndale, and the "Micropolitan" communities of Huntington Woods & Pleasant Ridge) all contained regionally recognized walkable downtowns, while their failing neighbors (Oak Park, Royal Oak Township, Hazel Park, Madison Heights) are characterized by typical postwar developments and contain no natural centers.
There are ~140 different municipalities within Metro Detroit. How many of them are on the best economic footing (meaning FCR above at least 3.43) as shown by the data? Just 6, every single one is within Oakland County and they all only account for 0.008% of the population of Metro Detroit (combined Franklin, Bingham Farms, Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Orchard Lake, and Lake Angelus) (32,842 pop).
Every single Metro Detroiter living under E 14 Mile Road within Macomb County with the exception of Mt Clemens, some 33.4% of it's population, lives in a financially distressed municipality.
With all of these facts in mind, I'm curious, what does the main dataset say about your City/Metropolitan area?