Shrinking Detroit has 12,000 abandoned homes

AFP ^ | Sun Aug 14, 5:03 PM ET

[TimeLord]

DETROIT, United States (AFP) - Rats or lead poisoning. When it comes to the threats from the broken down house next door, Dorothy Bates isn't sure which is worse.

"When it's lightening and thundering you can hear the bricks just falling," the 40-year-old nurse said as she looked at the smashed windows and garbage-strewn porch. "If you call and ask (the city) about it they say they don't have the funds to tear it down."

There are more than 12,000 abandoned homes in the Detroit area, a byproduct of decades of layoffs at the city's auto plants and white flight to the suburbs. And despite scores of attempts by government and civic leaders to set the city straight, the automobile capitol of the world seems trapped in a vicious cycle of urban decay.

Detroit has lost more than half its population since its heyday in the 1950's. The people who remain are mostly black -- 83 percent -- and mostly working class, with 30 percent of the population living below the poverty line according to the US Census Bureau.

The schools are bad. The roads are full of potholes. Crime is high and so are taxes. The city is in a budget crisis so deep it could end up being run by the state.

And it just got knocked off the list of the nation's ten largest cities.

"Detroit has become an icon of what's considered urban decline," said June Thomas, a professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University.

"The issue is not just getting people in the city. It's getting people in the city who can become property owners and stay property owners and pay taxes."

Perhaps the biggest challenge to luring the middle class from the area's swank suburbs is overcoming racial tensions, said Stephen Vogel, dean of the school of architecture at University of Detroit Mercy.

"Suburbanites are taking the bodies of their relatives out of cemeteries because they're afraid to come to the city," Vogel said. "There are about 400 to 500 hundred (being moved) a year which shows you the depth of racism and fear."

Most American cities have experienced a shift towards the suburbs.

What made Detroit's experience so stark was the lack of regional planning and the ease with which developments were able to incorporate into new cities in order to avoid sharing their tax revenue with the city, said Margaret Dewar, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan.

The fleeing businesses and homeowners left behind about 36 square miles (58 square kilometers) of vacant land. That's roughly the size of San Francisco and about a quarter of Detroit's total land mass.

While a decision by General Motors to build its new headquarters smack in the middle of downtown has helped lure young professionals and spark redevelopment in some of the more desirable neighborhoods, there is little hope the vacant land will be filled any time soon.

In his state of the city address, embattled mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said even if 10,000 new homes were built every year for the next 15 years "we wouldn't fill up our city."

And Detroit is still losing about 10,000 people every year.

One solution Vogel has proposed is to turn swaths of the city into farmland. In the four years since his students initiated a pilot project dozens of community gardens and small farms have popped up.

But first the city has to get rid of the crumbling buildings that haunt the streets, luring criminals, arsonists and wild animals and creating a general sense of hopelessness.

"It's partly a resource issue and it's partly a bureaucracy issue," said Eric Dueweke, the community partnership manager at the University of Michigan's College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

"It takes them forever to find the proper owners of the properties and serve them with the proper paperwork," he said. "They're tearing them down at the rate of 1,500 or 2,000 a year, so they're really not cutting into the backlog in any significant way because that's how many are coming on stream."

Dorothy Bates has been waiting three years for the crumbling house next door to be torn down. There are nine more on her short block along with several vacant lots that are overgrown with weeds.

Bates does her best to keep her five children away from the rat nests, but the lead creeping out of crumbling bricks and peeling paint drifts in through her windows.

The most frustrating part of it, says her neighbor Larry, is that so many of the abandoned houses could be repaired. The foundations are solid. The buildings are beautiful. Or at least, they were once.

[stocksthatgoup]

Raise Taxes. The Democrat solution.

[bella1]

I'm originally from Detroit, but fortunately for us my parents had the good sense to move to Fraser/Roseville when we were young. Detroit was always close enough that there was no escaping it. Luckily for me, I now live in northern Michigan and Detroit is but a memory (although i have a cousin on the fire dept. in Detroit so I still get to hear the horror stories).

[NavyCanDo]

The accolades of the most liberal city in America.

[MaggieCarta]

"I'm sure there are parts of the city which are nice"

No there isn't.(sic) You obviously have never been there!

Actually, there are still quite a few rather nice places. Obviously, you've never been to Indian Village, or to any of the homes around 7 Mile and Woodward (go west of Woodward, and north of 7) And, don't forget the Boston-Edison district.

Of course, you are right, all of these lovely enclaves are surrounded by utter decay.

[RayChuang88]

The only thing that could possibly fix Detroit is to make the whole city a Federal and state tax-free enterprise zone for ten years.

I could not agree with you more.

The city needs a visionary mayor of the ilk of Rudolf A. Giuliani to bring that place from the brink of abandonment. I mean, during Giuliani's time as New York City mayor we saw the massive revival of almost every borough in the city, including spectacular improvements to Times Square and Harlem. With the possibility Michigan's state government will take over the affairs of the city, we may just get a visionary mayor that will turn around Detroit into a desirable place to live again.

[alicewonders]

That bail scenario must bring a ton of money into Cabell Co. but alas, it too is run by the Dims!

Those are my thoughts exactly!!! Nearly bankrupt Huntington has found itself a nice little cash cow! Recently, 4 teenagers (2 of them white) were shot on prom night in the crack area of town. The public went crazy - "we have to do something about the drug problem" (now that some white kids got killed) - the police went through the motions of cracking down on the drug dealers. This lasted for a few months & now it seems back to normal. They wonder why everyone is leaving......

[Shalom Israel]

Oh yeah. Detroit is the only city I've ever worked in that takes taxes from you. Like it was a privilege to work there. They should have given me combat pay to come there every day

St Louis does the same thing. Another bastion of Democratic Government.

Pittsburgh, too. Another city controlled by a democratic machine; current debt is $2 billion, population declining, yet convention centers and stadiums going up at record pace.

[TXBSAFH]

When you remove your dead so you do not go back that says something. And it is not positive.

[doc30]

One of the reasons that Canadians have a bad attitude about the U.S. is becasue of Detroit. That city is the first impression many Canadians have of the U.S. and is used as an example of why the U.S. is such a 'bad' place. The reasoning is that if the U.S. is so prosperous, they how can the U.S. allow such horrible conditions in their own country? They actually believe that Detroit is representative of America in general. Then again, Detroit is the most liberal city. Any coincidence that it is on the Canadian border?

[the invisib1e hand]

oh, yeah. detroit's poster boy. how could i forget. the adolescent male madonna.

[cyclotic]

I posted this on another Detroit story earlier today. It fits this one too.

The minute Freman Hendrix takes office, he announces that beginning with the school system, followed by non-essential city services then by essential services, every single employee will be fired. They will then re-hire the 3 or 4 competent ones and start over.

Hendrix will become the absolute best one term mayor any large city has ever had.

Tough measures, but probably the only thing that will revive this once great city

[TheForceOfOne]

Detroit is just a piece of land where economic prosperity once thrived. Socialism will destroy whatever is in its path wherever it is invited like corrosive rust on the frame of a building until one day it collapses because the frame (Capitalism) can no longer support the weight of the contents of the building (Socialism).

Socialism is the desire to dilute the gains of Capitalism and defeat those who made it successful. It is stealing by the government and it is unAmerican.

Capitalism will flourish wherever it is invited as long as Socialism isn't. Detroit, like most major cities employ Socialism to appease the ever increasing minority population that inhabit their boundaries as the working class flees to the suburbs in a attempt to escape the crime, violence, and unfair wealth redistribution of Socialism praised by city politicians.

The old cities will die and new cities will rise depending on which road is taken.

[dfwgator]

[NZerFromHK]

I think relatively speaking, American cities going down the socialist paths seem to be on a faster track to ruin than other Western countries. One of the reasons is due to policy differences between city and outlying suburban townships due to the nature of local self-government in America. When you raise taxes, businesses automatically relocate to suburbs.

But in Canada, there is much less local self-government: basically most policies of significance are decided at the provincial or even federal (national) level. City councils largely function as maintaining local roads and clearing rubbish and even on these policies there are all sorts of "councils cocrdination efforts" by the provincial and/or national/federal government making all cities living under more or less the same degrees of socialism. What's the point of escaping the Toronto socialism when the suburbs or Ottawa have very similar politics?

Things are a lot more different in terms of council policies between Detroit proper and Novi in the suburbs than between Toronto and Whitby (an outlying suburb in the GTA), and of course there is basically no difference between Auckland City and Rodney District. In other words, US cities employing socialism is like driving a car at 100 mph with 2 wheels just fallen off, while non-US Western cities employing socialism is like driving a car at the same speed with one tyre slowly leaking. Things may seem to be better for the non-US cities under socialism in the short term, but at the end the result is still the same: wreck.

[Banjoguy]

I'm sure the blight, decay and emigration have nothing at all to do with cultural abberations (read: bad schools), fear, crime, filth and liberal (read: socialist) governmental policies. </sarcasm>

[doberville]

"Or, why doesn't the city just give it to anyone who promises to raze the old building."

Or, do as Baltimore did: Sell $1.00 buildings in town with the understanding that the homes wil be fixed up and lived in.

[dennisw]

Shrinking Detroit has 12,000 abandoned homes

Looks like a great setting for a dystopian science fiction movie. How about Predator vs. Terminator?

[Former Proud Canadian]

bump

[Loyalist]

At this rate, Detroit will be the city living in the shadow of Windsor.

[bella1]

As stated in my previous post, I grew up in and around Detroit and had been, in the past, to Indian Village, etc. And some of the original brick homes and their architecture were second to none. Alas, no longer the case, and they are becoming few and far between and you must risk your life to get to them. A few years back, while attending a wedding in Detroit, i had the bright idea to take a trip down memory lane and show my children the house in Detroit were I once lived. What a fool i was, as that house burned down years ago and the neighborhood is nothing but burnt buildings and crack houses. Needless to say my children were mortified and my parents, upon hearing of my stupidity, called me from Florida and chewed me out for putting their grandchildren in mortal danger!!!