In January, Astronaut Shane Kimbrough, floating 200 miles above Earth in the International Space Station, shot a nighttime photo of Detroit, Cleveland and Toledo, Politico Magazine reported yesterday. While Cleveland and Toledo are lit up orange-yellow, the Motor City glows bright white. If the same photo had been taken three years earlier, Detroit would’ve looked yellow and considerably dimmer, a perfect visual of the rapidly declining fortunes of a city that was once a beacon of American industry. Detroit was bankrupt, and nearly half of its 88,000 streetlights were dark, victims of budget cuts and copper thieves. After decades of abandonment and poor financial decisions, the city government had slashed maintenance budgets. When the sodium-vapor streetlight bulbs burned out, they could go months or years without being replaced. The re-illumination of Detroit is the result of a desperate but innovative plan that has pulled the city out of its dark age in a surprisingly short period of time. In January 2014, Detroit’s new Public Lighting Authority embarked on a three-year, $185 million project to replace the city’s failing sodium-vapor lights with energy-efficient LED lights. The new agency, created by the state and city governments, secured financing for the project while Detroit was in the midst of the nation’s largest ever chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy — a move that could help other cash-strapped cities.
