More Detroit Treasures That Might be Looted
More: Detroit’s Treasure Trove Could Be Vulnerable to Sale
DETROIT — A healthy, breeding female giraffe from the Detroit Zoo could fetch $80,000 on the open market.
Detroit’s half of the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel was valued a few years ago at $65 million.
A prototype of the 1963 Ford XD Cobra owned by the Detroit Historical Museum carries an estimated price of $1 million.
Belle Isle? Maybe several hundred million dollars for the 982-acre park in the Detroit River between the U.S. and Canada. Maybe more.
If everything is indeed on the table when it comes to turning Detroit’s assets into dollars, then the possibilities are nearly endless, bewildering and sometimes bizarre.
Detroit is teetering on the brink of the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. The city’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, and his team have said they want to evaluate everything the city ownas they begin negotiations with creditors in the face of $15 billion to $17 billion in debt and future pension obligations.
Orr already created a tsunami of controversy when he acknowledged late last month that billions of dollars worth of art that the city owns and has housed at the Detroit Institute of Arts are vulnerable to creditors. But he potentially could sell or privatize numerous other city assets, too, from public parks to operations of the city’s Water and Sewerage Department to sundry treasures found in some of Detroit’s other cultural institutions.
What is so surreal — and tragic — about the financial sinkhole that threatens to swallow Detroit is that the morass is deadly serious yet full of “Alice in Wonderland” perversity.
The very future of the city is at stake, as well as the quality of life throughout southeast Michigan. Yet the possibility of selling off city assets also leads directly to questions such as how much does a giraffe cost? And how does a citizenry cope with no-win scenarios pitting one indispensable gem against another?
What BofA, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch & UBS would REALLY REALLY like to do is send buses through the streets of Detroit, snatch up men, women & children, chain them all together and then auction them off to the highest bidder. And the GOP would CHEER and CHEER and CELEBRATE.
Oh look:
Romney was wrong about illegals, they don’t need to self deport, we should just deport them all or send them to Detroit. #uniteblue #libcrib— Tom Janoski (@tsj_washington) July 26, 2013
