That's a good question. An old friend of mine who used to work at Newsday once tried to get the paper to fund an investigation of who owned Manhattan. They almost went for it but chickened out. Basically no one really knows who owns Manhattan (and the buildings and the land are generally owned by different people). If by who owns Detroit you mean who owns the auto companies, that's pretty easy: big institutional investors. If you mean who owns the buildings and the land, that could be a big investigative project. The info is probably available, but I doubt it's in some easily analyzable form.
Doug
^^^^^ CB: Thanks for the help on how to even frame the problem. The real property , yes.
I have this fantasy about a web of finance capital sort of sitting on top of the city like a giant net in the form of debtor-creditor relationships. (If a web is not the right metaphor, what might be ?) Municipal bonds in the first place, but , with an army of Marxist accountants, I'm thinking it might be possible to map the whole range of financial relations,including mortgages ( want to include predatory loans), insurance (redlining especially). Others ? It would be a shifting , everchanging set of relations, making it much harder to track.
Of course, "Wall$treet" is not the geographic location in Manhattan, but a globe of scattered points channeled especially through lower Manhattan ( I think ).
As to the size of the investigative project, I can't think of a better way to spend our time for we predominantly mental laborers for the working class. The Detroit pilot project could be extended to other cities and places.
The ultimate idea is to put the names of the biggest creditors on the lips and protest signs of 10's of thousands demonstrating in the streets, demanding bailout, "forgiveness". We want a bailout like Chrysler, Long Term Capital, Continental Illinois and others got. We want to make the names of the creditors, household names in the homes of the debtors; and no debtor faces a debt alone.
Detroit will be Argentina !