Well, a picture can tell a thousand words.
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No, we haven't stolen enough. We are just getting started.
Posted on 10/31/2009 7:08:56 PM PDT by Son House
The city that was once one of the wealthiest in America is a decrepit, often surreal landscape of urban decline. It was once one of the greatest cities in the world. The birthplace of the American car industry, it boasted factories that at one time produced cars shipped over the globe.
Its downtown was studded with architectural gems, and by the 1950s it boasted the highest median income and highest rate of home ownership of any major American city. Culturally it gave birth to Motown Records, named in homage to Detroit's status as "Motor City".
Decades of white flight, coupled with the collapse of its manufacturing base, especially in its world-famous auto industry, have brought the city to its knees.
Half a century ago it was still dubbed the "arsenal of democracy" and boasted almost two million citizens, making it the fourth-largest in America. Now that number has shrunk to 900,000.
Its once proud suburbsnow contain row after row of burnt-out houses. Empty factories and apartment buildings haunt the landscape, stripped bare by scavengers. Now almost a third of Detroit – covering a swath of land the size of San Francisco – has been abandoned.
Tall grasses, shrubs and urban farms have sprung up in what were once stalwart working-class suburbs. Even downtown, one ruined skyscraper sprouts a pair of trees growing from the rubble.
The city has a shocking jobless rate of 29%. The average house price in Detroit is only $7,500, with many homes available for only a few hundred dollars. Not that anyone is buying. At a recent auction of 9,000 confiscated city houses, only a fifth found buyers.
Detroit is now $300m in debt and is cutting many of its beleaguered services, such as transport and street lighting.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
I'd estimate it to be worse than Hurricane Katrina because there is no Fema trying to get folks into better living conditions. The only economic stimulus was a welfare payment to help with heating bills, a line of folks 35,000 deep that only 10% gets assistance.
Taxes have to be lowered for all business and the rich who invest and create the Jobs, that is the only way to get the number of Jobs in diverse sectors to support as many Americans that want to work.
The politicians have to give up their lust for power over the private sector. Yes, the rich can get richer, but that is none of the Governments business, especially at the cost of losing more cities to this decline.
Immediate tax amnesty for the rest of this year, and a 9% flat tax, business or individual thereafter. Life is too precious.
Here’s our post from last night for links to those youtubes, ect;
Devil’s Night For Firefighters In Detroit Saturday
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2375055/posts
Crappy cars built by crappy union workers, produced by crappy businessmen working with crappy union bosses is how Detroit died.
Found a site with some good historic reference;
Forgotten Detroit
http://www.forgottendetroit.com/
Detroit is known for one of the most stunning collections of pre-depression architecture in the world. The past two decades have seen several of these treasures sit vacant, waiting for economic revival. On these pages you will find information about the past, present, and future situations of a few of these landmarks. It is my hope that this information helps you gain an appreciation for the importance of both the history and continued survival of these buildings.
- Statler ***
- Book-Cadillac ***
- Fort Shelby ***
- Lee Plaza
- Madison-Lenox ***
- Tuller ***
United Artists -
*** Madison -
National -
*** Adams -
- Metropolitan Bldg.
- Kales Bldg. ***
- Farwell Bldg.
- People’s Outfitting ***
Michigan Central -
G.A.R. -
Fisher Body 21 -
*** St. Cyrils -
*** Jefferson Baptist -
Detroit was destroyed on purpose. Now this nation is the target with Detroit as the model.
One of my favorites;
Detroit- City in Ruins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeUQLMEwUz4&feature=fvw
Set to the rhythms of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? and Inner City Blues, this video captures the fabulous ruins of Detroit, past and present.
Bump for later. Nothing happened I my Dad’s ‘hood.
Half a century ago it was still dubbed the “arsenal of democracy”
__________________________________
Now it’s just the “arse of democracy”.
Never had I seen or known how bad Detroit was till last night watching all the YouTube videos ...Incredible huh ... block after block of empty lots, rotting buildings, boats abandoned next to empty houses ...
I bought stock in Marshmellows just for Detroit last night? How’d my ROI work out?
Like this one:
...and still the murder capital of the wrold
Yep, all that. And the folks there are Americans, and all of them don’t deserve what liberalism bestows. They are going to have to work hard to dig themselves out of this rut.
This is America, they can do it. It’s our conservative guidance for the politicians that is going to catalyst. Don’t give up on them, support them by offering firm guidance to a liberal politician.
There are two ways to approach urban decay. The first is to ignore it, leaving burned out husks of rotting buildings. The other is for the city to foreclose on the large areas of desolation, demolish it, then put in foliage to uptake the soil contamination.
Eventually it can be redeveloped, and the larger the area, the more valuable the redevelopment. If done intelligently, and entire “zone” can be redeveloped, that is a “city within the city”, an enclave of prosperity from which other redevelopment can grow outward.
Eventually, the city develops a permanent redevelopment plan, so that in turn, parts of the city are repaired, rebuilt, and improved on a regular, long term schedule. This is already being done in some of the western cities.
This could be the future of the whole country.
Exactly - the baby boomer hippies have claimed it as their trophy.
One word:
Brought to you by relentless Liberal Democrats.
The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing
By now, it should be obvious that the government-sponsored initiative to renew this country's large cities which began in the 1930s and continued largely unabated in the East and Midwest through the 1960s and beyond has been a profound and devastating failure. More homes were destroyed than were ever built; once-great metropolises like Detroit lay in ruins; once-thriving neighborhoods were overwhelmed with drugs and crime; buildings that were built to last centuries fell to the wrecking ball mere decades after they were built; an entire generation of young people, both those who came to the cities and those who were driven from the cities into the suburbs, have grown up rootless, in a Hobbesian state in which man's life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
The traditional explanation, the one which no one believes anymore, is that all this was done to eliminate "blight." A more recent explanation, only slightly less implausible, is that it all came about because of faulty design, as if a nation of 260 million people, one which had already produced the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, couldn't come up with anything more inspiring that the average strip mall. The real story, it turns out, is different from both previous explanations. What began as the World War II intelligence community's attempt to solve America's "nationalities problem" and provide workers for the nation's war industries degenerated by the early post-war period into full-blown ethnic cleansing.
E. Michael Jones has followed the advice of Christopher Wrenn. Looking around, he saw monuments, but monuments to the folly and malice of social engineering and a government that had declared war on large segments of its own people. In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to do with design or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the last gasp attempt of the WASP ruling class to take control of a country that was slipping out of its grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be driven out of their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to be "Americanized" according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and "integration," the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood got transformed into something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the actual communities of people they saw as a threat to their control.
The Slaughter of Cities proposes a new take on familiar territory, e.g., to give just one example, the civil rights movement. Does anyone, for example, really know why Martin Luther King abandoned his southern strategy and came to Chicago during the summer of 1966? Does anyone really know who brought him there? Does anyone know who told him which ethnic neighborhoods he would march through? Hint: it was a religious denomination usually associated with Philadelphia that had been at work trying to "integrate" Chicago's neighborhoods since 1951.
Jones concentrates on four cities - Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago - in a book whose conclusions will be shocking and controversial. The destruction of the ethnic neighborhoods that made up the human, residential heart of these cities was not an unfortunate by-product of a well-intentioned plan that somehow went awry; it was part of the plan itself.
ROFLOL!!! Clever!
Yep, there were two more parts to that series;
A Tour Of Detroit’s Ghetto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6WKMNmFsxM&feature=related
A Tour Of Detroit’s Ghetto: Part 3 (Dec 2007)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHhUDKfiggY&feature=related
^
That first one was really gut wrenching to see
Detroit - brought to you by the Democrat Party, liberalism and the UAW.
Exactly, just the same reason that Eire, Pa. and Cleveland, OH are industrial wastelands … Unions.
Well, a picture can tell a thousand words.
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No, we haven't stolen enough. We are just getting started.
The people that want Card Check essentially want to make the rest of the country look like Detroit...that is the ONLY result that can happen (and they know it).
It would be VERY SMART for the Republicans to get in front of the issue and continue to show clips and pictures of what Detroit looks like and ask America if that’s what they REALLY want for the rest of the country.
Re-post of website on historical and disappeared Detroit:
The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit
http://www.detroityes.com/home.htm
Seems to be a good adjunct the great website you gave the link to.
Surely there must be a better position to take than simply “pro-corporate” or “anti-corporate”. It is interesting reading some of those comments blame GM for outsourcing the jobs to asia/mexico. Fact is, employees there will work for pennies. We won’t.
And of course the pensions, unions, etc can shoulder the blame as well.
It is the uAW far more than management. The laws are designed for the unions to extort, blackmail and hold hostage the companies.
The UAW is now trying to kill Ford and Ford is making some very good vehicles.
Re-post of website on historical and disappeared Detroit:
The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit
http://www.detroityes.com/home.htm
Seems to be a good adjunct the great website you gave the link to.
Yep, I don’t see how the property owners aren’t being held accountable
And those Unions walked away rich Washington lobbyist
Detroit is a model of what happens when liberal Democrats spread the wealth. It brought the whole city down. Rule of law collapsed when people looked the other way.
the city went from the highest median income to a pittance.
Average home value $7,500. Trailers in Mississippi are worth more than that.
This is a shame. This is also an example of what America will become if we don’t get back to making everything rather than letting Commie China make it and sell it to us.
That lead paragraph reads like something out of Atlas Shrugged. It’s a shame when a once-thriving metropolis is turned into little more than a concrete and steel ghost town with pockets of ghettoes and a lot of people who have essentially given up on ever becoming anything. It reeks of hopelessness.
Liberals don’t really want to share the wealth, they merely want to spread the misery.
In 1959 he bought his house for $6,000, he couldn’t get it back now, if he wanted to move.
It's been more than the past two decades. I'd say since the riots of 67 and the election of Coleman Young and subsequent Democrat mayors. Detroit never recovered from the riots and it kept deteriorating from then on. Urban "renewal" was a bad joke. The projects, welfare, gang culture, unwed teenaged mothers, crime and corruption. Coleman got rid of "STRESS", a DPD unit that targeted hard-core crime, so the criminals were allowed to thrive. (That's what got him elected. He said he'd get rid of STRESS and he did). Crime was rampant after that and Detroit just couldn't recover. All of the money moved to the 'burbs. No one wanted to live in a crime infested rat hole like Detroit. All of those hundreds of youtube videos of Detroit are all from different neighborhoods. It's a shame what happened to Detroit. It was once beautiful and vibrant. It had a huge population with neighborhoods that stretched for miles from the the middle of the city outward. Believe it or not, it used to be known as The Paris of the Midwest. The homes were beautiful and the streets were treelined. Every neighborhood had it's own shopping districts and churches and schools. Now it's nothing but miles and miles of slums.
www.youtube.com/user/waketheherd
I was around as a kid in those days; had a chance to read the Detroit Free Press at that time too.
No no no.
Off to re-education camp with you unless you get with the program.
Reread the article. "White flight", Rich folk with all the money, etc etc - They're to blame...
Not all the years of super high crime, violent gangs, and stuff you mentioned.
I notice that although the Communist Guardian writes a very long article about the fall of Detroit, they never mention any of the reasons, with the single exception of the phrase “white flight.”
One set of my grandparents lived in Detroit, and did very well there. Nice houses, beautiful city.
What destroyed it?
I think two things, in particular. One was, of course, the Auto Worker’s Union, which at first fought with the big three auto executives but then learned to cooperate with them in producing bigger and clunkier cars for higher and higher wages and benefits, that were increasingly poorly put together. First they were threatened by Volkswagen, and then when that started to go downhill, the Japanese moved in, and gradually developed non-union plants in the USA. Why buy a lousy union-made car when you could get a well-made Japanese car for about half the price? Fewer maintenance bills, better mileage, and better handling.
The second factor was the blacks. FDR started it by moving large numbers of blacks up from the south during the Second World War. They stayed there, and gradually took over the auto and other unions as white workers retired.
Then the Democrats developed a plan. They brought blacks into all the inner cities in the name of racial justice, killed the old Catholic ethnic neighborhoods, and deliberately turned the cities into permanent welfare dumps that could be relied on to vote Democrat. The ethnics—Italian, Irish, Polish, etc.—moved out to the suburbs, and the cities were basically hollowed out and destroyed. Blacks might have moved into the cities in the normal course of events, and it would have been OK, but they were poured in in overwhelming numbers, and deliberately kept on welfare, preferably with single mothers and broken families. LBJ deserves a lot of the credit for that.
As Ozone34 points out, E. Michael Jones has written about that. Several books, in fact. I broke with him over what I considered to be his growing antisemitism; but his books are still very much worth reading, if you take them with a certain amount of caution. No question that the destruction of the old inner city neighborhoods was a deliberate Democrat plot to accumulate power and turn things the way they wanted.
Of course the Guardian can’t admit any of that. So they really can’t account for what happened.
Bush's fault.
Yep. And it's up to us to stop it, by any means necessary.
Had the unions not practiced extortion over the past 40 years, outsourcing wouldn't have happened.
the Republicans to get in front of the issue and continue to show clips and pictures of what Detroit looks like and ask America if that’s what they REALLY want
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Brilliant, it works in so many ways to, like that ‘Jobless recovery’ Democrats are trying to sell on the heals of their Stimulus bill
The city took a sharp turn for the worse under the hip hop Mayor and his family. Dave Bing and Robert Bobb are doing what they can to restore dignity to both the city and the school system which is ripe with corruption. If they do not succeed then it will fall in the next ten years.
Bing is challenging the Unions and Bobb is challenging the School Board.
Living in the suburbs I hope they are successful but I am not holding my breath.
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