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Time for Beto O’Rourke to wake up
Another casualty to the sin of pride
When I was working as a city official in Warren, Michigan, we were working to revitalize an older community that was being eclipsed by newer greenfields.
Warren was and is the third largest city in Michigan. It was one of the communities populated as people moved out of America’s urban centers in the 1950s and 1960s. But now, the houses that once seemed so large compared to the houses in Detroit paled compared to those of the next ring of suburbs. Families were having fewer children while at the same time having more cars, resulting in a mismatch of municipal services to modern needs. And the tax revolts of the 1970s and 1980s saddled older communities like Warren with a cap on their tax increases, something that did not affect the newer, less developed communities.
Despite the factors that were totally out of our control that made managing a city like Warren challenging compared to the same task in a newer community like Sterling Heights, the leadership of Sterling Heights gleefully looked down their noses at us, blaming us for the challenges we had to address despite the fact that they were the…
