The destruction of Detroit

It is about 30 years too late to try to save Detroit. The only option now is to bulldoze at least half of it. The problem is that they are not aggressive enough, they need to get the holdouts out, and rip up everything streets and all, by the sq/mile.

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@gungasnake,

That's sad indeed. The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force recently issued a report estimating it would cost nearly $2 billion to get started on cleaning up Detroit. I'm sure it will actually cost much more if the "geniuses" in Detroit's corrupt and incompetent city government and HUD bureaucrats have anything to do with it:

Quote:

Detroit spends $8.7 million to flip 30 homes that bring in $2 million

City officials spent as much as $537,000 per home renovating 30 houses under a federal program to fight blight only to sell most for less than $100,000 apiece, a Detroit News investigation has found.

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Best thing I have seen analysing what went wrong is here

http://www.freep.com/interactive/article/20130915/NEWS01/130801004/Detroit-Bankruptcy-history-1950-debt-pension-revenue

Around 1980 was last great hope, the infrastructure was still in reasonable shape, and there was still a lot of skilled people around who wanted to work. Unfortunately the political system barely functioned for decades, it was not possible to capitalize on the opportunity.

Actually, the story of Detroit looks a lot like the story of America, only they went first.

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@hawkeye10,

Those pictures are stunning. Apparently there are large numbers of houses which were perfectly livable, at least from outward appearances in 2007, which have simply collapsed within a space of a few years.

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@gungasnake,

gungasnake wrote:

Those pictures are stunning. Apparently there are large numbers of houses which were perfectly livable, at least from outward appearances in 2007, which have simply collapsed within a space of a few years.

Buildings dont like being empty. There are entire brand new cities in china filled with block after block of empty high rises built in the last 5 years that the chinese are hoping get populated before the buildings turn to dust.

If you look.at the link I gave you will see that Detriots population collapsed after 2000 as people gave up on the city wholesale.

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--0z3U8wmI--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/18yw7jrxeh4hmjpg.jpg

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@hawkeye10,

That's what was said about New York City 40 years ago. What they need is conservative leadership, law and order and a focus on job growth and quality of life issues. Do the voters have the guts to throw out the liberal leadership that caused the problem or will the voters look to the Feds for another handout?

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@woiyo,

That's really sad. With all the other problems China has, they don't need that.

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@woiyo,

woiyo wrote:

That's what was said about New York City 40 years ago. What they need is conservative leadership, law and order and a focus on job growth and quality of life issues. Do the voters have the guts to throw out the liberal leadership that caused the problem or will the voters look to the Feds for another handout?

Lack of law and order was NYC's main problem, but detroits was that they were a one industry town and that industry went into permanent decline as imports and then automation gutted employment.

Searching out new industries that could use the cities then skilled workforce was the only answer, but again automaton was the check mate because no industry was needing many of those kind of workers. A massive half trillion dollar American high speed rail project is something that America needs and that would have saved Detroit, but America was never going to do it.

Bottom line, a functioning political system would have helped, but the problem would have been a difficult one. What the now black lead political system did was rabble rouse, do little of consequence on the problem, and drive the skilled and monied whites out of town further complicating the problem.

Now there is nothing to save. Detroit is a derelict mostly empty unneeded city in an area if the country the people dont generally want to live in, partly because the entire region is in decline. The only sensible action is to give it back to nature, 1 square mile at a time.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

Detroit wasn't a one industry town. Have you forgotten the music business?
You've heard of Aretha Franklin? And so many other great musicians/singers.

http://www.biography.com/people/aretha-franklin-9301157

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@Miller,

And White Castle was big so it was also a restaurant industry town Drunk

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@gungasnake,

gungasnake wrote:

Heartbreaking story:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-07/death-and-decay-detroit-real-time-seen-streets

A glimpse into the future of the USA

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@Pamela Rosa,

How do you figure, racist?

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@Pamela Rosa,

It doesn't have to be that way, but major reforms are needed to prevent that.

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@gungasnake,

It's intentional.
It's a planned demolition.

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@Pamela Rosa,

Pamela Rosa wrote:

It's intentional.
It's a planned demolition.

You must love the story of Detroit because the conventional wisdom is that it became doomed when the citizens voted in a black mayor. The Detroit Free Press did an analysis that I linked calling this reading false, but a lot of people still believe it.

FULL DISCLOSURE: my wife lived in Detroit for about 5 years as a kid, and I have distant relatives who still live near there.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

Coleman Young served as mayor of Detroit for well over a decade, and did a great deal to undermine the city through his corrupt payoffs to municipal unions; use of city employment to reward political allies; often overt racial hostility; and incompetent management of City funds. These actions created a general feeling of hopelessness contributed very significantly to accelerated white flight, adding to the already fast declining economic fortunes of the city. It was during and after his term in office that Detroit entered its social and economic free fall.

Coleman Young happened to be black. But the harm he did resulted from his corrupt behavior and exploitation of racism to maintain his political power, not his skin color.

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Gary, Indiana ranks pretty close to Detroit regarding industrial blight.

Grim images of a once leading industrial center.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

These actions created a general feeling of hopelessness contributed very significantly to accelerated white flight, adding to the already fast declining economic fortunes of the city

THere have been multiple waves of hopelessness along with the resulting flight. I earlier showed that population has plummeted since 2000, and these have to be blacks because the whites had already gone. About the only ones left are the desperately habitually poor, who more often than not also are illiterate.

Quote:

“We estimate that approximately 376,000 adults 16 and older in the City of Detroit read at a 6th grade level and below – which makes them not eligible to participate in work training programs, or even to study for the GED exam,” said Margaret Williamson, executive director of Pro-Literacy Detroit.

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2013/07/29/low-literacy-rates-in-detroit-complicate-duggan-vs-dugeon-match-up/

This is even worse than New Orleans before Katrina, and there will be no storm to blow these hopeless people out and disperse the dead weight to make it easier to pull. There is nothing left to work with to save this city and no one in their right mind is going to set up shop in a crumbling city with all of these useless people to pull. THe feds cant come to the rescue either because too many other cities would line up for aid, because pushing money at NYC is still after all this time controversial, and because no one in Washington for decades has cared much about the health of American cities in the first place.

EDIT: I just looked, The New Orleans poverty rate is now back up to pre Katrina levels. However the argument still holds I think because literacy levels are much improved.

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The destruction of Detroit

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