offers his thoughts op class-action lawsuits. greenhouse talks about the challenges american workers face today. and later, a reairing of the former deputy assistant to president trump, sebastian gorka. find more on book tv.org. now here's more on detroit's bankruptcy. >> good evening, everybody. >> good evening. >> that's a good detroit response for c-span. my name is peter hammer. i'm a professor of law and i direct the center for civil rights here at wayne state university law school and welcome you. at the center we take very seriously the proposition that structural racism is our generation's civil rights challenge. i think you will see the stories we have here provide kind of a personal narrative of what it means to be living in a city

dominated with the effects of spatial structural racism. i want to give a shoutout to the deal, who is the sponsor of this, generously supported by the kellogg foundation. we have just ended our fourth cohort which we're celebrating. we will be announcing our fifth. but as a capacity building and fellowship building program that takes 25 or 30 individuals working at organizations dedicated to racial equity and takes a year-long process of trying to develop skills, teach lessons, build capacity and build trust and fellowship that enables better collaboration in advancing racial equity. that's the deal. our other partner is pages bookstore. we introduce now susan murphy from pages bookstore. [applause] >> hello everybody. thanks for coming. so yes, i'm susan murphy. i own pages book shop which is on grand river, right near where i am.

we're so happy to be here tonight and have jody talk about the book. if you've not read the book, it's an easy read, i think, because it is so engaging with the characters that are in the book. jody is a research professor at the new york university, previously on the law faculty at cambridge university. she also teaches bankruptcy law at columbia law. i'm saying law a lot. she is elected member of the american law institute, past term member of the council on foreign relations, and a technical advisor to the bank for international settlements. she's received a prestigious multiyear grant from a foundation to research her book. until 2014, she was a law professor at cambridge university where she also served as the deputy director of the cambridge llm program, the deputy director of the cambridge center of corporate and commercial law and as a fellow of peter house college.

she received her undergraduate degree from harvard university and graduate degrees in law and in journalism from columbia university. she lives in new york city currently. she will be joined today with steven henderson, who is our local pulitzer prize winning journalist and also the host of detroit today. we may have a couple other guests join up here on the panel discussion, who were profiled in the book by jody, and we'll escort them in when they arrive. so with that, what we're going to do is have jody start off. she's going to talk a little bit about the book and doing a little bit of a reading, and then there will be in conversation with steven, and then they will open it up to questions and answers. so with that, i'm going to hand this microphone -- no, you don't need it. i'm going to give it to steven.

>> thank you so much for being here. i'm excited and also have some trepidation about discussing this book for you. this is your city. this is what you've lived. and i'm eager to hear your responses and hope that we can have as much time for a conversation as possible. so i'm going to keep my remarks to a minimum for that, and what i like to do is this is a book that follows seven people living in detroit, during and after the city's bankruptcy. it's not a book about downtown. it's not a book about midtown, where we are. it's about the neighborhoods where the seven people live, and i'd also point out that the time period that the book is in, it ends in the fall of 2018. so i'm aware that there have been some changes in the years since then. so what i would like to do is introduce you to the seven people in the book.

two of them have just arrived, and i'm really glad to see you both and then quickly read you a very short two-page passage and then go ahead and begin to talk about it. so charles and miles from the book are here. do you want to introduce yourselves? >> yes. i'm charles -- >> i will do it. you stay there. there we go. speak into the mic. >> i'm charles ferguson. >> i'm steven miles. >> do you want to say any more? i don't want to talk about you in your presence -- >> not yet. [laughter] >> right. correct me if you don't like any of this, but charles is a lifelong detroiter. his family moved here from the south during the great

migration, made it in the car industry, bought a house in morningside that was a real achievement for them. charles has watched his block change a lot since then, at the time of the book, eight out of 16 houses are occupied, and you've wondered whether you want to stay in detroit. >> actually i will stay in detroit. >> you will stay. glad to hear it. and miles, miles i think in a way you are a metaphor for detroit. you were a contractor in the lead up to the financial crisis. you owned a home that you were proud to own in a neighborhood that you felt was very stable, with families. played outside and sat on the porch. you've had a hard time making use of your construction skills

since then. you have a house that you bought with two years it turns out of outstanding property taxes. you knew about the later year and not the earlier year and have struggled against fines and fees and other things to try to make it here. >> so often it's something that come out of nowhere. every so often. when we first bought the house, we looked up all the taxes and everything, and we got a record of it. within six months in, next thing you know you have issues to where the house is in foreclosure because of back taxes that i was told nothing about. >> so you are both very heroic, and i'm so grateful to you for spending all the time talking to me over the years and opening your lives to me. >> we needed the story to get

out because it is not just us. it's thousands of other people that went through it, and they probably don't ever get a chance to tell their story. i was more than happy to give up my little part of it because it hit the whole city. it didn't just hit one group of people. it hit everybody around here. it don't seem like it changed out of ten years. like they say it is over with, it don't seem like it is over with. there's a different thing going on. it's different downtown than it is in the neighborhood. >> so thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of your time and thank you for being here tonight. it really means a lot to me. >> well, i personally think about the bankruptcy, municipality had in the city of detroit, and they said they built up the municipality, but

in the meantime left the people bankrupt. what can make a comeback when we have a governor -- migrants come in and buy up the homes. make a statement come in and buy the homes after what you would call i would say gentrification, and using that word is a basically what has happened here in the city of detroit. there's been a plan for the longest -- for instance, i will give an example. here we've got an -- [inaudible] -- we had in the city of detroit. but overall we're going to tear that down because we have a new plan for joe lewis arena. there aren't many joe lewis type people that have an arena name in the city of detroit.

overall, a situation like that, next thing you know, you no longer need it on jefferson. you got rid of the arena. what would be next? we can't even go and work anymore in jefferson. what's happened here? who speaks for the little man? it was free. it costs to go there now. but we've got this big development downtown. all this money, private money, not private enough for the citizens to walk to a plaza this they were allowed to walk for, what, 30, years? -- 30, 40 years? >> so i hope i have been true with what you've entrusted me with. let me tell you about the other five people in the book, quickly. one is robin who has

opportunities from the bankruptcy. he has been in the past a filmmaker in los angeles, but has looked for opportunities in the real estate market and come to detroit and begun investing in detroit really right before the financial crisis hit. he used the bankruptcy to spin a narrative to investors, but ultimately he is someone who is trying to do good in the city of detroit, wants to be doing meaningful projects, and ultimately has a hard time bringing abandoned buildings back into productive use. he tells a story of that being harder than one might think. another person in the book is reggie who has a very compelling real estate story, as most of you know, many of the aspects of the economy here are not functioning as they do in other parts of the country, including

the mortgage market. reggie wanted to be a homeowner. he's adopted some children from a relative and really wants them to have a stable home to come to, and he buys a house on a land contract, and he pays the full payment on the land contract, renovates the house. it turns out that the woman who sold it to him had not been paying the property taxes. he loses the house to a foreign investment company and ultimately the house is burned down. also in the book is cindy, who is a life-long white detroiter. she has lived in brightmore as the 67 riot and bussing predominantly, she's used bussing as really a crucial moment in her life, led people to leave the neighborhood. she -- her family didn't have the wherewithal to leave. her mother responded to bussing by saying that she should stay

home from school, so she has been living in brightmore for her life. she gets involved with the urban agriculture community that's come to the city and really achieves a lot, on the board of city organizations, ultimately you see her and her role in that begin to break down because of divisions over things, like outsiders and immigration. lola is another person in the book. she is unfortunately now working the night shift at the chrysler plant and so isn't here to be here tonight. she is a single mother in her late 20s. she has dreams of starting a business. she has a four-year college degree, but she is commuting 80 miles each way to -- well, she was commuting 80 miles each way to a job at the call center. her job at the chrysler plant is since we stopped talking.

at the time we were talking, she was commuting to this call center for minimum wage job and struggling to stay in her house, but she does not feel very safe in, worrying about her daughter's education in the detroit school system, a system where students receive half the amount of funding as students in new york or boston. finally is joe who is a white man from new jersey who has come to detroit with a lot of ideas and talent and education and cash. he buys a commercial space and has ideas of starting a business in it. he is beset by the lack of lending and has trouble finding money to be able to renovate the commercial space. his wife and his daughter join him. his daughter is quite successful here, working in restaurants and

bars. he has a new baby, and i think we see him encountering a lot of the problems that life-long detroiters face, even as someone who has come much more recently, worried about crime in his neighborhood, worried about where the baby will eventually go to school, trying to get by doing tree work, in an economy where there isn't a lot of disposable cash to pay for things like trees. so those are the seven people in the book. and i want to quickly read one passage from the book. it's from early on in the book. and i've chosen it because i think it illustrates how cities are people. the people's progress is ultimately the city's progress. and austerity policies seem to just further our national divide. so this is reggie, early on as

he's bought a house on a land contract. over the following months, as reggie worked on the house, courtney taylor came in person to collect his installment payments. she indicated neither shame nor surprise at the house's condition. reggie didn't know that she had bought it for $2,100. ever polite, he thanked her and called her ma'am. his round cheeks dimpling even as he struggled. he fought to replace all the old carpet because the padding had melted into the floor. he got lucky and found a used furnace. he shorted bills and did without, but he couldn't afford to fix the foundation or replace the roof. when it rained, the basement leaked and condensation appeared on the walls in several rooms in the house. across the country, speculators who made bulk purchases of mortgage foreclosed properties began using land contracts like the one reggie signed to off load the unprofitable properties

from their portfolios on to unsophisticated buyers, often in minority communities. properties left vacant and scrapped and properties in neighborhoods with low rents or scarce resale prospects didn't offer good long-term investments, and the speculators turned to land contracts to liquidate their holdings and avoid the regulations that would have applied to a traditional sale or rental arrangement. mortgage lenders would have had to disclose the quality of the properties. landlords would have had to maintain the properties and return deposits when tenants left. the speculators targeted land contracts to populations similar to those who fell victim to sub prime mortgages. both instruments used the guise of helping low income families who couldn't qualify for traditional mortgages attain homeownership. in the case of land contracts, homeownership meant poor quality houses, without traditional

consumer protections. the families who bought the properties lacked access to loans to finance the repairs that most of the properties needed, which made it likely for necessary expenditures to lead them to default on the contracts and lose their homes. caught up in making the house livable for his newly larger family, reggie never confirmed that courtney taylor was paying the property taxes on the house. most states including michigan didn't require land contracts to be recorded. but few contracts seemed to end in ownership. by february 2016, at least 300 properties of a primary participant in the markets were land contracts. a dallas based asset management firm had entered foreclosure in detroit for nonpayment of property taxes. the firm had purchased more than 6700 mortgages foreclosed single family properties from the government-sponsored housing lender fannie mae at an average price of $8,000. and then resold the properties

on land contracts. by that time, reggie had finished making his house comfortable and he and his family had grown to love living in it. the living room had neatly painted walls, a brown carpet, lots of framed family photographs, leather sofas with woven pillows and humming radiators. reggie prepared giant lasagnas in the kitchen and hosted extended family on the lawn. after he had paid courtney taylor in person at the house for months, she suddenly directed him to send money orders to a post office box. he wondered about the changes, but decided not to ask questions. he didn't want to threaten the homeownership nearly within his reach. so i will pass the ball to you and begin to talk about these stories. >> give her a quick hand -- [applause]

>> so i want to start with sort of big picture question. when you read the stories in the book, and you get in these stories, it is impossible as a native detroiter not to think back to a time when things were different in the city, when there was more opportunity and when it seemed as though possibilities were a lot more plentiful. i'm born in the city in 1970 in a neighborhood that looks a lot like what charles and miles are describing about where they live and was very familiar to me based on the stories you are telling in the book, and i can remember that neighborhood being much more stable than it is today. most people on the block own their own homes. they were all african-americans.

they all had employment. and that was value in those homes that should according to the way that we think of property and investment in this country, should have produced an incredible amount of intergenerational wealth for people like us who are still here. so i want you to talk a little about what turned and when it turned and why to take all of that away. i do a lot of work in the neighborhood where i was born now. and i can't help but think of it as sort of a postscript to the great migration and the opportunity that the auto industry gave to people who took advantage of that. what did we do wrong? where did we go wrong with the kinds of investments that african-americans were able to make in the city in the 60s and 70s that now are virtually worthless? >> and do you mean primarily the

housing -- >> housing, sure. >> -- piece? in a way, i mean, this was a pure example of what bankruptcy can't do, when you balance a budget, you don't return property value that was lost. you don't return the property tax revenues that those properties generated in any kind of direct way. if we look at the more recent piece, and not at the whole picture, because this is very complicated, in detroit, the demographics, it's 80% african-american. that is the population that we know is targeted by sub prime lenders so that in 2005, nearly 70% of mortgages in detroit that were written were sub prime. the national percentage for that year was 24%. so that is a difference. and what that means in real

terms in personal wealth, most people their wealth is in their homes. that's especially true in this demographic. so you see just a sucking of wealth from detroit and cities like it in terms of tax revenues and in terms of personal wealth. we also know that in detroit houses were secured less well than they were in other places, that there was a practice of zombie foreclosures where banks actually didn't complete the foreclosure so that they weren't on the hook for paying property taxes. and then there's the story that reggie begins to tell that that all of this ends up with this large swath of the city somewhat in limbo and ripe for investors to come in who perhaps found profits in rental housing in other parts of the country, but in detroit often found that the

houses were scrapped, that there wasn't enough of the rental demand, that it wasn't going to be profitable to own those properties and began to off load them through instruments like land contracts which carried great risks, echoing red lines from decades ago. >> and so when you think about, again, the last decade, but putting it in that sort of larger context, there are some distinctions between what we see here and what we see in other cities. i've always believed that the effects are here are more dramatic and more widespread than they are in other places that i've lived, chicago, baltimore, washington, d.c. and those cities have been better able to recover from the effects of the things that you're talking about. now obviously those cities have tremendous problems of their own, and the demographic dynamic

to all of that, the fact that african-americans, you know, suffer more than other populations is also true, but those cities have opportunities that we don't hear. what's your sense of why that's true? >> let me -- let me tell you some of what miles has told me, and i don't want to speak for you, so please jump in as you want to, but miles -- miles had bought a house when he was very young, amazingly. he had an understanding of building wealth through real estate and ended up getting not a sub prime mortgage for it but a sub prime loan to make some repairs. >> refinance -- [inaudible]. some repairs, bring the house up to code. [inaudible].

then they tell you you have to pay in a certain amount of time or you're late. [inaudible]. the whole thing seemed like it was set up from the beginning. they started drawing up something simple, a regular refinance, catch up on some bills keep your property together. the next thing the adjustable rate, when the market goes up, your payment goes up. but then it goes further and further from your income. you miss a day of week or miss a week of work, you're subsequently in debt. next thing you know, two payments, you're in foreclose. you have this house 16, 17 years, if you want to keep it, we will add extra 2, 3,000 from attorney fees or other stuff, there you go, you can finance

that out, it is going to your mortgage and you will be all right. then you found out it was like a class action suit that they had that they were posting people's payments 30 days late and they weren't even late yet. they were five days late, seven days late or whatever, but they would tell you you have a late payment, then we found out it was supposed to be 30 days, and then they changed all of that. next thing you know, they came up with something else. you're losing your house. the neighbor down the street is losing his house. the next thing you know the whole block is. >> before that happened your plan was to be a landlord and you had bought another property -- >> [inaudible]. i was going to buy another house down the street and then that's when the problem started happening with the work and keeping up my income, and the market kept changing, and the payment kept going up, so it started getting out of reach, and then i guess my credit

wasn't good enough to keep the house, so i ended up letting it go because i couldn't afford it no more. >> and the house that you were arranging for the landlord situation ended up getting set on fire and burned down. you ultimately found a house that was being sold at a price that you could afford that had been won in the tax foreclosure auction but an llc that had bought 100 houses in the auction that year, sold it to you for about five times what they had paid in the auction. >> [inaudible]. but then the ones that didn't fail, they would put back on the market, and then they would sell it to you six months before foreclosure, but it's like when they bought those houses, they had stipulations on those houses that they were to keep the taxes up, and they were to pay those

taxes, but they didn't pay the taxes. they sell you a house and didn't tell you the taxes weren't paid. you go to the county and the county only goes back so far. when you go to research, you say okay, i assume these taxes, i can catch up with this, but then you find out there was another year worth of taxes that they didn't say anything about. now you are in foreclosure, so you lose your investment, everything you put up, or you swallow that debt and try to keep it going because you don't have nowhere else to go. >> this is incredible. i mean, miles was sold a house that was effectively already in tax foreclosure. having done everything right, having gone downtown to check the records, and that is a story that you seem to hear of life in a city that has had to cut its services, you know, tax bills that had no relation to the value of the house because it hadn't been appraised in a long time. tax bills that were incorrect

going to vacant lots and that sort of thing. :: that's one of the things that is different about detroit and cities like chicago or baltimore or boston. what is the solution to that?

how do you figure it out when it's been broken as it is and reggie is a great example of that in the book. >> since the financial crisis change in regulation and mortgage lenders have for better or worse made it more expensive. you will seyou'll see the storys being unwilling to send appraisers into neighborhoods. the city has various programs that they are trying to see the mortgage market and all of the

ownership have flowed from the bankruptcy to the land bank that owns about a third of the properties in the city so the programs are bold programs with various ways of trying to restart the market with preapproved money and joe's neighborhood which is bordering some of the neighborhoods that have remained stable throughout this history neighborhoods like the university district. it's substantially more than they have and in those successes

he was surprised at some that were beginning to take place, but that is very specific and they have various qualifications that are difficult in a city with the credit scores of the population in detroit which is the lowest a in any country so this is a problem and it is hard. a balanced budget doesn't do anything directly to address those. it's hard, slow work. >> what do you do about all the people that lost their equity then within the mile.

in the home ownership and there is the majority renters i know the statistics following the financial crisis in the wealth gap has increased from the factor of four to a factor of six. you can use the wealth to college to study business perhaps come and if you lose your home and don't have access to that it explains the people that stayed here and how to hold the values while everybody else left. when the banks didn't even want those houses, the people that

were still there, we are one of the hills and the neighborhoods, so the speculators and prospectors can come through and choose. all the good neighborhoods and houses and then that is when you are about to auction in the land bank when they go to others, so you get people from different states come in different parts of the country, different cost-of-living they can't afford to take back texas for two or three years. so every time we go to the auction you have a couple hundred thousand dollars and come out of the two or $3,000, what are you going to do? you're going to rent from them and they waive all of these discovery pulses and stuff they used to tell people. now they can just give it to you for nothing because you didn't have anywhere else to go. you didn't have no other choice and that is the strength of the people still here in the city.

you can see it on their face when you don't know where you are going and you don't have a grandmother or mother or nobody that has stability anymore because everybody lost their house. now you have 23 families in one house. >> detroit is in the top five zip codes of profitable arrangements among the very heartbreaking stories that i heard during my tenure, it gets me every time when you describe how when your parents moved into the house and how your father planted a rose bush in the backyard and then how you dug up the rose bush when an investor that have told you it was time to leave the house.

[inaudible] a bittersweet feel. we stayed ultimately. the property value went from 150,000 to $12,000. meanwhile majority are vacant or torn down. not that i was afraid, but 20, 15 years ago, once it started to change a different way of looking at things and you come home to the same house and the neighbors say they no longer live there. you see the ups and downs.

it was a monopoly that has never been addressed yet. insurance companies charge you more money. if it's not a conspiracy, what is that? this is no accident. this is by design. it looks like you took more than just the house to make things

worse. poisoning the people in flint, what is the difference, they both committed genocide. one of the things we are lacking is investment. there isn't enough capital in the neighborhoods in detroit to fix some of the problems. now we can talk about investment in property or we can talk about investment in people, but either way, it's about capital. at the same time there is a

skepticism about outside capital coming into the city. talk about how you manage those things in the city that would do better by the people who are here and resist some of the things we talked about with gentrification with the kind of exploitation of people who don't have needs. >> it's a very complicated question and you may all disagree with me, but my reading of this is that detroit needs capital and a lot of the problem was with disinvestment over past decades. it means density in

neighborhoods and there are ways to tailor that. i'm worried about the neighborhoods that don't have capital coming neighborhoods that have names we've all heard about. i'm thinking of cindy's neighborhood and at a certain point in the book a bullet comes through the front window in the middle of the night and it goes very near to where her daughter is sleeping. trying to get a window fixed and and that never gets fixed. she is worried that no matter how much glass she picks up, one day her daughter will go to school with a cut and child protective services will take her daughter. that i guess you could say that company that owns the house is an investor, but that's not the

kind of investment that you are looking at. how can we tailor to this? if we look to the wall for help, there are tax credits for affordable housing, affordable tax credits for many things, but a lot of the language has never been defined in a way that would be helpful to the revitalization goals. i think we can begin to tailor money like that but are going to live in the house but they buy and we have the owner occupied houses in neighborhoods which we know from all the stories is what matters. how do you mac data to recommend them getting their homeownership back? >> [inaudible] >> now you ar

>> now you are asking the really hard questions. >> it's always out of our reach. if you had to list the criteria, you wouldn't need that, but it comes with a whole bunch of stuff that you can't fit the criteria. you miss a payment or two, i give you whatever you need. you lose your whole life. it's like shooting dice with the devil and the banks don't even want to help. >> you have a house and know how to fix it. it would be a very small amount of capital that would enable you to do that.

if you could do what you had planned to do all along with your house, the force that would be on your block to have a beautifully renovated house with a home owner that cares about it. if they don't care that the city. they don't care about downtown, they don't care about themselves anymore, because they don't have

anything to care about. it's like they basically have been brought off. the city council has been cut from some type of crazy deal. but they are not working in the neighborhoods. >> i should revise some of what i said earlier. and i just did. with d detroit in many other cities. they are writing full-time at the bankruptcy laws and i am a great believer in the process, but what i wanted to do is go

behind the headlines and really look and evaluate any long-term way with bankruptcy meant and for the people that go through the process. i really feel like you found me in a way because you are willing to stick with me and trust me to talk to me somebody that has lost their health and real estate seems very emblematic of the a lot of the problems that the city faced in the lead up to bankruptcy and a lot of us were talking about now the challenges that it faces so i started with

that and i spent some time i see the very nice person from the united kingdom in the audience who allowed me to tag along doing door-to-door canvassing. there are issues that similarly had been challenging to the city before the bankruptcy and the key to the revitalization issu issues. the entrepreneurship, transportation. >> the title i always ask and the cover which i'd heard some

people they were in love with and if was being used to represent the image. >> i take coverage because it has a lot of meanings that we are all applicable in various ways. i have to say i had nothing to do with that. >> that was the publishing house and that was their call. i'm going to open up to questions in a second, but i wonder what you see as easy low hanging fruit kind of solutions that would at least accelerate some of the things you think we are doing right or correct some of the things we are doing wrong and what is within our grasp.

>> i think detroit needs jobs for people who have been living here and that is hard work. there is a time i was working with lola at the call center answering calls about air conditioning symptoms to be the systemofecosystems and one of ts said you know instead of answering questions about air conditioners, you could sell them and probably do a lot better. the stores are functioning, she would often tell people in the directions they could avoid a traffic light by going through a

very empty parking lot, but it has a home depot and at that point her grandfather was driving her each way to work but she asked him to drop her off and if there were any jobs available but she was very clear that even if they had a job, which in fact they didn't but if they did, she would never want that job because she knew she would be paid on commission and she wanted to be aware and to her the money was in the suburbs, so it's not even having a job. there's a lot to do. there's training and transportation to get there but it seems that there is a lot of money that could go to that instead of going to subsidies to attract corporations and that is one fix. >> how did they get to work if they can't even drive their

vehicles? how would they even get to work? [inaudible] you know car insurance here has cost upwards of $6,000 a year as compared to an actual average of $815 a year that makes it very hard to get anywhere. that is the cost of a lot of housing in the city and this is where again with bankruptcy can't do the city knows this is a problem. the current leadership has called this a matter of civil

rights when most jobs are in the suburbs and three quarters go for work. it's a matter of state law and there is very little they can do. since the time of the book, i know that the new governor has passed some changes. i know they haven't come online yet. >> they are not nearly what i think they need. they will lower the rate a little bit but it's still something that needs a pretty significant reform. i want to open up to audience questions. i'm going to tell a story just as he was driving a friend's

car, somebody bumped into him at a railroad crossing. you are waiting in the car waiting to see if the car behind you would call the police knowing that something somebody with car insurance would do a this is the second term to stop

the different individuals. the fight is never ending. you've got the light company there with the monopoly and overall it is just a fight that continuously has been a fight. how do they come up with something that is going to help detroit and not give tax breaks to corporate america downtown other than sooner or later coming to the people that lost their house. [applause] it's good to audience questions.

steve mentioned why is detroit different. you've just got to speak a little into the microphone. >> how is it different from chicago and other major cities and could you comment on the fact that gm and chrysler had to be rescued and how big of a park do you think that played in our difference? >> another set of bankruptcies. the question how was how is it different in other cities.

i would first say that in many ways, detroit isn't different. i think that it is on trend with what as a country we have been doing with our cities in past decades. cities didn't used to go bankrupt. they were supported by their state and federal governments. federal assistance has been calling steadily by 1980 and 1988 we've responded to the financial crisis with a sequester which cut federal discretionary spending. states all of whom detroit have balanced budget requirements turned around and passed those cuts and they've been left increasingly to try to balance their budgets by going into the financial markets and all of the risk that was accumulated data

and performed well during the financial crisis. so, detroit i think is representative. it also is in some ways extreme with the car industry. it's been largely a one industry town and that is an industry that has suffered from globalization, deindustrialization, suburbanization. i was reading about cuts to the plant taking place right now and so that is certainly a contributor and now detroit is somewhat unique on the other end. it's because of that car industry at a place where there are many large philanthropic foundations because of this struggle american spirit that is also the place people read about and care about embassy as a

reflection of america so that it has not had as much as some of the other municipal bankruptcies have seen. >> my name is glenda and i'm a long time detroit by way of mobile alabama. five years ago i purchased a house on the land bank i paid cash for it. two months later i got a tax bill for back taxes for $3,500. i wasn't told by the city that there were going to be any additional taxes. fortunately, i was able to pay. a lot of people when they get this kind of those they have to walk away even after they've paid cash for a house. i've also attempted to get a four bedroom, four bathroom house. i attempted to get a 25,000-dollar loan from the bank

and at the time i was missing six figures. i couldn't get the loan. these are the things happening to people of color every single day. he works for the city. i'm retired now. i pay for full coverage. this is what is happening to us in the city of detroit.

using somebody else's address in the suburbs this is what is happening and has been happening for decades now in the city of detroit and i am blessed that i've owned five property. the rent for my tenants is 450 to 525. you can't find any affordable housing in the city now so people are moving to flat rock come all these downriver communities. do your history and understand what's going on with the bankruptcy that has affected all of us directly or indirectly because of choices other folks

have made that affect all of us one way or another. 700,000 people still live here and they are making do at a very high cost for things where you live in other parts of the country into the idea that when you live in america matters and determines your level of opportunities is problematic and if something all of us as americans should care about to be a country. she just segued into my questi question. my question will be based on

people that have means within your book and i ask that because i moved back to detroit to buy a house and had a great credit score because of all the stories i know one of my friends her father was a dentist retired and they lost their home, they had been paying their mortgage for years and they got the letter and realized their house was gone. i know people that moved away. one of my good friends in paradise valley arizona that during the downturn tried to buy a building downtown, completely shut out. i tried to look at home condos with my realtor. my question is have you covered

that. that ties in with investors as you mentioned that how much of that do you talk about? people that do have the means that are completely shut out? >> i think when he comes from new jersey and is deliberately moving to detroit and has looked at several cities he sees as having more open space and is excited to be here and have an idea for the reinvention and has an impossible time finding a house divided. as he understands it, a lot of that was the lacit was the lackn the market you would be looking at a low price was so low that all of the brokers were returning the phone calls and eventually bought from somebody

who put up signs saying we pay cash for houses and he knew the house had problems but he was glad to have it and ran into similar problems to get a commercial space for the business idea that he had for the vacant properties for whatever reason it just didn't seem to be for sale and he felt lucky to find what he found although he never knew the identity of the person he was dealing with to buy it. he bought it at the equivalent of a land contract arrangements that he was mailing monthly check out a p.o. box but he did pay it off and take ownership. >> so you've touched on as far as investment and people moving into jobs and housing values as

well as people moving away and one of the things that impacts a lot of that is people feeling safe. you talked about how they won't send it out because they don't feel safe because in bankruptcy the cities had to, a judge had to determine whether or not the city could meet its responsibilities of citizens into things like police and firefighters. is there any legal responsibility for whatever value is lost or the lack of investment in the neighborhood? where people are not able to maintain homes due to the high

rates. >> bankruptcy for cities is new. this is something that wasn't originally in the code until we got the great depression and even then it wasn't really used for cities. maybe if they lost a lawsuit and suddenly needed to pay a lot of damages, but this use of bankruptcy for the generalized challenges, this is something you really didn't see until after the financial crisis. what bankruptcy does is it is to negotiate the process to write down the debt. it doesn't get into the nuances of what you are talking about. cindy owned her house and doesn't have a mortgage, she thinks that she would like to believe and she has a whole plan

she will drive to memphis where she has a relative and then she realizes even if somebody wanted to buy her house which is difficult to imagine him even if that, she wouldn't be able to sell it for as much as they used camper trailer cost. [applause] >> thank you to all of you for coming out. >> dealing with this is not

rocket science. dealing with this is about making sure that the interests of this industry don't outstrip and overpower competing interests that are just as important. they need to be regulated. and it's possible. this is the part of it where i feel like american assistance and american news consumers are privileged in this regard because the western oil majors are either headquartered here and as such, the federal government has the ability to change the behavior of all of the western oil majors all at once by requiring them to do business in a way that is more responsible even if it comes out of something as basic as bribing a foreign government. one of the last sections of the book is section 1504. it was really refined oil companies to declare publicly

when they were bribing other countries. you just have to be open about their payments are to the foreigfor theforeign governmentt people in those countries and those of us here and anybody that wants to do activism around the issue can tell whether they are bribing people to get their way and that became the law. they went crazy about it into the industry didn't want it but how could that have a huge impact in the world in terms of what companies are able to get away with it is a small thing. literally the 1,500th section of the bill and habit that comb through it would not have changed the world in one fell swoop but it would have made a difference from some of the most toxic behavior and that is the first thing the republicans and the trump administration overturned. they didn't argue about it.

people could easily buy firearms so the oil industry didn't have to declare. we as a country watch out for things like that and understood and appreciated the importance of those things we try harder to stop that from happening. >> i'm very delighted to welcome you to the event today on the case for class actions, a book written by professor fitzpatrick that kind of galvanized the debate. we have three outstanding speakers, panelists i should say. first is the head of the class action practice that has litigated and