Detroit to Shutoff Lights to the Poor

If you live in a “distressed” neighborhood in Detroit, meaning black, poor, and crime riddled, Detroit has a solution. Shutout the lights and let the criminals murder and drive away any remaining residents there.

From Bloomberg here:

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.

As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city can’t afford to fix them.

The plan would leave sparsely populated swaths unlit in a community of 713,000 that covers more area than Boston, Buffalo and San Francisco combined.

“You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.”

Detroit’s dwindling income and property-tax revenue have required residents to endure unreliable buses and strained police services throughout the city. Because streetlights are basic to urban life, deciding what areas to illuminate will reshape the city.

Liberalism killed Detroit. Now central planning is going to literally lend to the extermination of the vulnerable. Only its veiled under cute terms like “reshaping the city.” Light Out, Detroit.