Can Detroit Annex All of Southeast Michigan? A Mayoral Candidate Wants To

A candidate running for mayor of Detroit has floated a plan that amounts to a high stakes game of Hungry Hungry Hippo with the city gobbling up neighboring communities like the marble chomping child's board game.

Rogelio Landin, whom the Detroit News describes as a "long time political activist," puts forth a plan to bring more than two dozen suburban communities within the city limits of Detroit with a goal to once again put the city's population above the million mark.

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Comments on the Detroit News Facebook page when sharing the news was overwhelmingly negative from likely suburban residents.

City-to-city annexations are extremely difficult in Michigan. Much easier is township-to-city annexations. It's the reason why many townships became cities (think Dearborn Heights born out of the remnants of Dearborn Township or the Grand Rapids suburbs of Wyoming, Kentwood and Walker all former townships incorporated into cities).

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Also making the proposal extraordinarily unlikely is the decades-long adversarial relationship the city and suburbs have had. Detroit is ranked as the nation's most segregated city while the metro region as a whole is the 4th most segregated.

MichiganPublic summarizes years of history into this succinct paragraph on why:

Researchers for the study point to Detroit's history as a destination for Black Americans from the South during the Great Migration, and the efforts by city and state government to keep these new arrivals segregated to certain neighborhoods. The segregation in the metro area increased as white people fled to the suburbs, making Detroit a majority Black city by 1980.