G.M.'s Tax Burden in Genesee County

Who was the largest taxpayer in Genesee County in 2010? Despite all the layoffs and abandoned factories, it was our old friend G.M. But the automaker's tax burden is getting smaller. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Tax appeals filed by General Motors Corp. have resulted in more than $8 million in lost revenue for local governments in the Flint area since 2010.

Genesee County's African-American Diaspora

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Genesee County population dropped to 428,790 in 2008 from 437,445 in 2006. That's not a big shock, but the racial disparity in the expatriates is unusual: "The county lost nearly 7 percent of its black community, but less than 1 percent of its white population between 2000 and 2008," reports Beata Mostafavi of The Flint Journal.

Murder by Numbers

With unemployment levels climbing, it seems the rest of the country is catching on to a reality that Flint residents figured out a long time ago.

Peter S. Goodman and Jack Healy of The New York Times report:

The unemployment rate surged to 8.1 percent, from 7.6 percent in January, its highest level in a quarter-century. In key industries — manufacturing, financial services and retail — layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business.

“These jobs aren’t coming back,” said John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia in Charlotte, N.C. “A lot of production either isn’t going to happen at all, or it’s going to happen somewhere other than the United States. There are going to be fewer stores, fewer factories, fewer financial services operations. Firms are making strategic decisions that they don’t want to be in their businesses.”

Manufacturing losses are bad enough, but many workers settled for retail jobs when their factory work disappeared. Now retail is drying up? Not good.

The Times also provides a depressing county-by-county breakdown of unemployment numbers across the nation. The numbers are bad in Genesee (12.3%) and Wayne (11.7%), but you have to go Up North to get the catastropic percentages: Presque Isle (20.1%), Cheboygan (18.4%), Baraga (20.6%), and Ontonagon (17.2%). But keep in mind you aren't counted as unemployed when you've given up hope of a job and stopped looking. Genesee County's real unemployment rate is easily over 20 percent.

In California, some of my journalism students have been conducting brief interviews with people about how the recession is affecting them and their families. They've also asked students how much debt they'll have at graduation and how they plan to pay it off. The profiles aren't exactly uplifting:

Name: Nick Arb

Major: Marketing
Year: 2010
Debt: $50,000 and Rising
Deep thoughts on debt: "I have to start paying back six months after I graduate, so I need to find a job and live within my means and not necessarily put a whole lot away. Just pay off the debt as soon as possible. I'm applying for internships this summer and I'm going for the same position as grad students, so I know when I graduate, with or without an MBA I'm going to be going against people with better degrees and more qualifications. I'd like to (pay it off) within 15 years of graduation, hopefully less. The sooner the better. I know there will be something out there. It might not necessarily be your dream job, but you gotta get paid."

Banning Plastic Bags Might Not Help the Environment

Genesee County is considering a ban on plastic bags. It sounds like an obvious way to help the environment, right? That's what San Francisco thought when it enacted a bag ban. But it turns out all the ban does is encourage people to use paper bags, which turns out to be worse for the environment.

Joe Eskenazi told the counter-intuitive tale in a recent issue of SF Weekly. He writes:

Still, a number of cities and even nations have weighed the scientific evidence and concluded that a San Francisco–style ban simply shunts shoppers to paper bags and is markedly worse for the environment than the status quo. "Paper bags have a greater environmental impact than plastic bags, and therefore you would not create a policy that banned plastic and forced everyone to use paper only," said Dick Lilly, the manager of the waste prevention program for Seattle Public Utilities. After much analysis, that city spurned the San Francisco model in favor of a fee on all bags, meant to spur shoppers to bring their own.

Genesee County officials should read the article before they act. There's no denying that plastic bags are about as evil as plastic water bottles, but a ban might actually make things worse. The real solution is getting people to embrace BYOB — Bring your own bag.

The numbers game

New census numbers are out for Genesee County and the results are distressing, but not surprising — people are leaving the county, especially young people and African Americans.

RoNeisha Mullen reports:

"Genesee County is losing residents at a rate more than double that of years past, according to a Census report released today.

"It hits home especially in the black community, where population has been on a constant decline. Nearly 5 percent of the county's black residents have packed up and headed elsewhere since 2000.

"Many young black people don't believe they can succeed in Flint, said Torchio Feaster, a 26-year-old lawyer.

"'The city is struggling, and a lot of these kids don't have two-parent homes, so they don't think it's feasible to achieve the American Dream here in Genesee County,' he said. 'They don't know any black people who've made it, so they think they can't make it (here) either.'

'In all, about 3,000 people left the county in 2007, compared to about 1,500 in 2006.

"Of those 3,000, almost 1,000 were between the ages of 18 and 24."

The overall county population dropped to 434,715 in 2007, down from 436,141 in 2000.

Housing swap

Here's yet another example of the creativity — or is it desperation? — inspired by the flagging housing market: Some homebuilders around Genesee County are willing to take your old house off your hands, provided you buy one of their new houses.

Melissa Burden of The Flint Journal reports:

"With home owners struggling to sell their houses in an over-saturated market, some builders are offering a trade instead. Home owners buy a new home built by the construction company, which agrees to buy the old home.

"At least three area builders have such programs -- which builders say are helping them make deals in one of the toughest times the U.S. housing market has weathered.

"'We're seeing more of this,' said Lee Schwartz, executive vice president for government relations for the Michigan Association of Home Builders in Lansing. 'There are a number of companies now, that in order to sell existing housing stock that they have, they are buying the home of their customer. Generally it's a company with good resources behind it.'

"Builders with these programs likely are losing money on buying your house, but make a profit on the sale of the new homes."