Detroit, Mi: City Service Delivery (or not) and Collaborative Solutions

The human flight from Detroit exemplifies a collective action problem for those who remain: the (+/-)750,000 remaining residents in a City with scale and infrastructure for 2+ million can't sufficiently be served by police, fire, public lighting, trash collection and other such standard services because the scale of the infrastructure can't be sustained by the tax base. As a result neighborhood groups have to organize their own snow-plowing in winter, and, as shown in the image above, the residents on one side of the street have set up their own street lighting.