After a tumultuous four years overseeing a city long riddled with blight, corruption, crime, and historic financial issues, mayor David Bing has had enough, telling a stunned audience at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History Tuesday that he'd leave when his term ends in December. In an interview with this reporter last summer, Bing said that he’d inherited a “hell hole” from Kilpatrick. Over the past few days and again during his speech on Tuesday, he came as close to lashing out as his detractors as he ever has publicly, targeting everyone from the Council to Snyder to residents and the media.
On Monday, Bing went after the media that he said should stop "trashing the city" and ignore some of what he called its "warts." "Every time somebody comes to our city--especially from the outside--they go into the same neighborhoods," said Bing, who has trumpeted that his administration has torn down nearly 10,000 abandoned structures during his tenure. "They look at all the decrepit homes. They don't go to the good neighborhoods."
Those "warts," though, include as many as 80,000 abandoned homes and at least 60 abandoned buildings downtown. Many of the "bad" neighborhoods have been dens for drug use, sexual assaults, murders, and kidnappings. A large number of them surround many of the city's public schools. Even the "good" neighborhoods are pocked with abandoned homes, and the city's midtown and downtown are pocked with abandoned structures, some in the shadows of hotels and stadiums.