A short walk away from Rome’s idyllic old town, with its world-famous monuments and high-end boutiques, Rome’s working class and middle class neighborhoods paint a very different picture of the city. The Eur district, a white marble extravaganza proudly built by Mussolini during the Fascist era, sits grizzled and desolate. San Lorenzo, once a working class neighborhood emblematic of Rome’s bright future, is now a case study for declining metropolises, rife with violence and crime. Some have even championed that, away from the charms of the Vatican and the Trevi Fountain, Rome is starting to look like another city far past its prime: Detroit.
As Detroit did in March 2013, Rome recently teetered on the verge of fiscal collapse. The rejection of a federal bailout that would have helped the city pay its dues this fiscal cycle garnered international attention, after anti-establishment parties refused the measure, citing unjust use of federal funds to resolve local overspending. It was common knowledge in Italy that Rome was on the verge of default, but the new possibility that the central government would not apply emergency measures deeply shook Rome’s establishment. In peak moments of the crisis, Rome’s mayor Ignazio Marino even threatened to have to bring Rome to a standstill, insisting that diversion of funds would halt essential city services like traffic assistance and public transportation.
At the peak of the crisis in late February, radio stations, blogs and newspapers across the country began mentioning an unlikely sister city for Rome: Detroit. There was a fear that, like the Motor City, Rome would default on its debts, putting the fate of the city’s public works at the hands of bankruptcy lawyers and city government-investor tug of wars. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi eventually struck a deal that would keep the city running, albeit under the condition that the city government would commit to drastic reforms to rein in spending. Comparisons to Detroit may have been far-fetched, as Italy clearly wouldn’t allow its capital to go bankrupt, but in its own category, Rome’s situation can be seen as equally dire as the one that put Detroit’s fiscal woes up to international scrutiny.
Demographically, Rome and Detroit share little in common. Crumbling from a peak population of nearly two million people in the 1950s, Detroit now boasts little more than 700,000 inhabitants. This change was mostly caused by an exodus of wealthy whites who made up a significant portion of the city’s tax base. In contrast, some estimates place Rome’s population at around five million, with public services and systems often running at full capacity. The Detroit urban area, with its considerable suburban sprawl, is quite large. However, Rome’s government is responsible for a larger city area than that of even Paris or New York, creating an urban management nightmare. And while the Detroit budget has serious holes, it is incomparable to the €1.2 billion ($1.7 billion) that Ernst & Young has estimated Rome overspends each year. Differences in scale aside, though, the fundamental issues that face both cities’ futures are equally discouraging. Most clearly, city coffers in both Rome and Detroit are virtually empty.
Detroit’s fiscal decline has been prevalent for years, and now the city’s services are truly on their last legs. It takes unacceptably long times for citizens to receive police, medical or firefighter assistance, a byproduct of chronic belt-tightening measures. The city’s revenues are incapable of paying for even these baseline needs, not to mention the towering debt incurred by pension obligations to its public workers. As a result, Detroit has spent decades cutting back budgets and scrapping unaffordable projects. The city still remains chronically cash-strapped, and few efforts have therefore been made to improve the miserly basic services that the city provides. In Rome, on the other hand, the lack of serious measures to reduce debt in the past meant that public services were left to stagnate instead of being scaled-down. This reality has arguably made the city’s situation even more difficult to resolve, as there had until recently been few moves to cut expenditures.
In its context of a much larger city, Rome’s baseline public services are in equally precarious positions as those of Detroit. The three state-owned companies that provide Italy’s trash collection, transportation and water supplies all have staggering deficits in their budgets. Atac, the subsidiary running Rome’s public transportation grid, has accumulated losses of €1.6 billion ($2.2 billion) in just a decade. Some of these difficulties are to be expected; Rome is one of the world’s most archeologically rich cities, where any construction or maintenance project can take years and be prohibitively expensive, meaning that higher operating costs are unavoidable. Still, some of the deficits arise from mismanagement or are the fruits of an unsustainable system. For example, every day, 1,400 of Atac’s 12,000 employees stay home with excused absences, a statistic endemic of a well-meaning public system that is rife with abuse by employees. And, demonstrating lack of proper oversight and accountability, Acea, responsible for water treatment and distribution, pays its chief executive four times German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s salary. As a result, it is not enough to say that Rome’s services are simply more spread thin than Detroit’s— they are also replete with redundancies and wasteful policies.
However, if Rome tried to follow Detroit’s example of privatizing service companies, experts agree that the companies would probably be sold off as worthless and would be dismantled. Currently, Rome is not even legally permitted to delegate public projects to private companies, meaning that a battle over changing those rules would first have to ensue— a battle that could potentially take years and could set off rows amongst myriad political parties and unions. As a result, only robust government intervention and company overhauls have a hope of significantly improving the larger public systems. Unlike in Detroit, where bankruptcy has proven useful in overcoming important structural obstacles such as pension commitments and union pressure, a similar move by Rome would instead gut its problematic, but expansive, infrastructure. In this regard, Detroit is akin to Rome in its baseline problems, but its solutions based around chapter 9 bankruptcy proceedings are inapplicable.
In hard economic times where even basic city services are at risk, both cities’ dwindling public institutions face precarious futures. Although maintaining a cultural presence means very different things for each city, art and other cultural institutions doubtless make up a large part of each city’s identity. Detroit’s Institute of Arts (DIA) remains one of the best so-called “encyclopedic” art collections in the nation — a legacy of the city’s past as a well-off and cosmopolitan city. In the city’s golden age, the museum amassed an impressive collection with invaluable Van Goghs and Rembrandts. This was all done in a buying spree almost exclusively funded using city money. In line with federal bankruptcy proceedings, the museum’s art is now considered a city asset that can be sold off, and several struggles to maintain the museum’s pieces have therefore emerged. The DIA’s role in the city is especially unique because its endemic lack of patrons, as well as dwindling numbers of visitors, means that unlike most U.S. cultural institutions, the site is mostly sponsored with public funds. The focus on downsizing the city to reflect its deflated stature and wealth may very well mean that the museum could be whittled down to satisfy debtors. This may, nevertheless, make sense in a place where museum-going numbers have dwindled, and when Detroit’s cultural scene is arguably no longer of strong national, or even regional, importance.
Shockingly, though, the art-crazed city of Rome is finding itself in a similar cultural crisis. In line with new bailout conditions imposed by the Italian federal government, Rome is expected to “reassess” its most ambitious urban projects. The city might find that it has to liquidate two of its most well-known cultural venues: the Palaexpo cultural exhibition center and the MACRO, Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Both these sites give the city world-class cultural status, endowing increasingly gentrified neighborhoods with forward-looking and edgy community spaces. But now, under tight budgets, diminished visitor numbers and managerial chaos, these entities’ operability threatens to shrivel up in the next calendar year. This is a product of both their internal crises, but also of the ossified mess that is Rome’s city government. Of course, the city still would still have plenty cultural capital to lure tourists and inspire locals even without these spaces; what is at stake, though, is Rome’s place in a greater Italian, or even European, context. Although Detroit has essentially been shuttered, both as a city but also as a cultural and social entity, this has little reflection on the greater state of US cultural clout. On the other hand, in terms of art, creativity and diplomacy, Rome is almost unparalleled nationally, and remains a bastion of the country’s “soft-power”. Walking in Detroit’s art-impoverished footsteps, Rome’s loss of soft-power may just bring the rest of Italy down with it.
An unexpected point in common between Detroit and Rome is that, in many ways, their respective federal governments have historically employed a hands-off attitude. This may make sense for Detroit, which is just one of many American industrial outposts, but much less so for Italy’s cultural, diplomatic and legislative nerve center. Outside moments of crisis, Rome receives no special stipends or allowances that recognize it as an entity responsible for managing many of the political, cultural and social events in the country. When the Pope recently carried out two beatifications, the local government was expected to pay for the event from its own yearly budget, although it can be argued that this was the responsibility of the greater Italian state. As Claudia Dasconti explains in a Panorama article, “Rome is, in fact, only a capital by name,” in that it is not given any of the special administrative powers befitting a capital, or even a highly populated city. In comparison, Washington D.C. is a specially-decreed capital district, and New York City is a metropolitan municipality, allowing both cities special administrative and juridical powers. Rome does not even manage its own budget; all revenues produced in the city are submitted to the Rome’s host region, which is then in charge of providing Rome with a (mostly inadequate) budget. In practice, this means that Rome loses much of the flexibility it would need to make key changes to the way it is run. As of now, though, it is at the same administrative level as Detroit, which likewise has to ask for county or state approval for key decisions. Perhaps if either city was given more say in its budget and management, many of the long-term financial and structural issues which plague both Detroit and Rome may have been resolved sooner.
When the Wall Street Journal raised the alarms on a “Detroit-style bankruptcy” for Rome, critics were quick to object to the comparison. Rome and Detroit have a very different standing and consequentiality within their parent nations, and making case-to-case comparisons is essentially misleading. Perhaps, though, this comparison’s popularity within Italy reflects a larger issue in the Italian mindset, where for many in the wealthy industrial North the capital’s fate is deemed of little consequence. Even a key figures like Veneto Region President Luca Zaia championed that the “Detroit model” be applied to Rome’s case. As many global-minded pundits may agree, this statement is nothing short of irresponsible. Granted, Rome must be prodded to resolve the myriad structural issues that are both emptying its coffers and inhibiting its progress, but to advocate for letting Rome loose despite knowing the potential fallout is to disregard how important Rome is for “Brand Italy,” giving Italian culture and products a global significance. Rome has little in common with the crippled Motor City, but it’s about time that more Italians take note.
Thank you for this insightful piece.