Posted on 08/15/2005 3:32:16 AM PDT by 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.
Excellent observation, most excellent question! A question to which there is no "feel-good" answer, only sound bites from the DNC play book.
SEE..SEE..SEE..!!! It's all because of RACISIM!!!!!
GM is still there? Perhaps GM could save itself by leaving detroit.
When you remove your dead so you do not go back that says something. And it is not positive.
In Portland Maine there was a cemetary on the West End that fell into disrepair. The new Stevens Avenue Cemetary opened and many people moved their relatives from the old cematary to the new one. This was in the mid 1900s. People have been moving their dead for various reasons for many years.
(s)no Detroit is falling because taxes are too low, the solution to low tax revenue is HIGHER TAXES. (/s)
Where in Detroit did you grow up?
>>Lead in bricks?<<
Creeping in through windows?
My company has a plant on Detroit's east side which is doing really poor right now. A few years ago for a period of several years we were dealing with a manpower agency which was supplying the plant with weekend workers. Their job was to recruit, test and interview people which we would ultimately hire. I can't tell you the number of complete losers which would file thru our main gate only to be rejected during the testing or drug testing.
For those who were ultimately hired, I would say only about 5% worked long enough to be asked to work full time. Granted being required to call the HR office Friday afternoon to find out what shift you were going to be assigned to for the weekend is kinda tough to arrange your life around but when you don't have a job anyway, some people would jump at the chance to earn some money.
Heck, there were many weekends that even I volunteered to work production even if it meant coming back in Friday night to work the midnight shift at 11:00 p.m.
The turnover in people during that time was absolutely awful.
You mention "Many Kids" but I will go out on a limb to say "Most of the kids" in Detroit will never have a family sustaining job let alone any job that could last their lifetime.
I had to laugh at perky Granholm's recent trip to Japan to try to entice Japanese manufacturers to set up shop in Michigan. Until Michigan becomes a "Right to Work" state that ain't ever going to happen........
BUMP!
I haven't heard of Lake City, what's it near?
I still love to visit the Detroit Fox Theater. What a beautiful place. I admit, I don't stick around after the show.
Between Houghton Lake and Cadillac, 50 miles south of Traverse City.
No there are not any places left that are nice. My grandparents lived in one of the last remaining good neighborhoods. Last I heard, their home had been turned into a brothel.
My grandparents passed away 20 years ago and the rest of our family moved out years ago because of the lack of property value and the high taxes.
We have that same problem here in Lansing. I'm not in any way a fan of property seizure, but when a derelict building stands for years, without taxes being paid, without improvements being made, the property owner has forfeited their right of ownership. That's a really good idea you have, btw, using these properties as training locations. So good, in fact, I'll bet the powers that be in Detroit will never think of it.
Can you say "Coleman Young"
BUMP!
I was being very PC when I said "many children" in regards to welfare. We all know the truth is that most of them will be unemployed for most of their lives.
For a period of time I managed a small auto body shop in Detroit. We hired local 'talent' to do prep work. I would guess that 8 out of 10 we hired never worked long enough to collect their first paycheck. The reason in most cases? Stealing from the cars they were prepping.
I've heard of it, but what is this "right to work" program?
Glad to hear you were able to leave.
I heard that if you repeat "Coleman Young" 10 times while staring into a mirror, he comes back from the dead and robs you. Probably just an urban legend, but I am not taking any chances.
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