Highland Park, the community nearly surrounded by Detroit, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because it cannot pay its bills to the utility providing drinking water and sewage services to a city that was once a thriving auto manufacturing town, the Associated Press reported. It serves as an example of blue collar cities that lost their way amid changes to manufacturing and are now shells of their past, plagued by neighborhood malaise, neglect and deep poverty. More than 50,000 people lived there in 1930. Homes 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. Owing about $20 million to a regional water service, Highland Park is considering municipal bankruptcy to keep its financial future afloat. 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. In 1907, Henry Ford bought 160 acres of land for what would be his Highland Park Ford Plant. The first moving assembly line started a few years later at the plant. Immigrants and other workers eager to earn $5 per day flocked to the area. A building boom followed that included thousands of homes along tree-canopied streets. The automaker would keep a tractor plant in Highland Park and Chrysler, now Stellantis, had its headquarters in the city. But both moved away in the 1990s. Like Detroit and other large urban cities, white residents began fleeing Highland Park in the 1950s for the suburbs. Jobs followed.
