The late Coleman Young, who was Detroit mayor from 1974 to 1994, said that when the nation gets a cold, Detroit gets pneumonia. That’s sadly held true during the coronavirus pandemic: The city had recorded 7,904 cases of COVID-19 and 716 deaths from the disease as of April 21, making it a national hot spot and putting Wayne County, Mich., among the U.S. counties with the most deaths from the virus so far, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. The city of 670,000, Detroit is bracing for a recession as stay-at-home orders decimate businesses and the virus overwhelms medical and social resources. Casinos, which generate 17 percent of municipal revenue, are shuttered indefinitely. A quarter of all Michigan residents are already out of work. “While we have a health crisis, we have the biggest budget crisis this city has seen in seven years, and we have to solve it at the same time,” Mayor Mike Duggan said at an April 14 briefing. The pandemic is a major financial test for cities across America. In a recent survey conducted by the National League of Cities, more than 2,100 municipalities of all sizes said that they were expecting budget shortfalls. But Detroit is in an unusually precarious position. The crisis has hit five years after the city emerged from the largest-ever municipal bankruptcy and two years after it shed state financial oversight.
