Kevin Houston sits on the front steps of his home, May 9, 2023, in Highland Park, Mich., a small enclave of Detroit that is considering chapter 9 bankruptcy due to a $20 million debt to a regional water authority. Houston grew up in Highland Park and acknowledges that the city has too many vacant houses and overgrown lots. He says Highland Park is"not a bad place to live" but"it's not the best." HIGHLAND PARK, Mich.
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 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 agoTroubled cities like Highland Park are the toughest cases in America to figure out how to fix, because they have so few assets to build on, said Alan Mallach, author of a soon-to-be-released book, “Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World: Learning to Thrive Without Growth.
“They have appalling levels of poverty and abandonment,” Mallach said. “A city like Highland Park probably cannot turn itself around all by itself. They just don’t have the resources.” Highland Park and communities like it have been fading as jobs dry up and families move away, but before the decline began, the auto and manufacturing industries helped build up some of these inner ring suburbs.