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.
You bring up an excellent point. You analogy does extend to Canada, too, but on a much larger scale. Canadians desiring more and better opportunities are emigrating from Canada to the U.S., just like 'white flight' from liberal U.S. cities to the suburbs. There is little opportunity for carrer advancement under socialism and under the branch plant economy of Canada, so talented Canadians, like me, flock to the U.S. If the U.S. increased permanent immigration from Canada, there wouldn't be many people left and you would have an entire country resembling Detroit!
OF COURSE THEY HAVE LEARNED!!!! They have learned to bully and bluff the white man into pouring more money down the hole of pure irresponsible laziness and crime.
There are MANY MANY educated hard working BLACKS that will tell you the freeloading segment of their race know how to work the system and the White man is intimidated and studpid to let it happen.
Let's all grow up and forget this PC position of not talking facts and truth. I am tired of it. I see our country being ruined by 3rd World immigrants WHO WILL BE TAKING OVER MY GRANDCHILDREN'S country that all the men in my family fought wars for. THESE hyphenated amkericans are ALL LOSERS. They add nothing to our country and we need to speak out.
Sorry but reading about Detroit is so scary because IT IS OUR FUTURE if we all who have any sense, Red, White, Blue, Black don't start standing up and calling these people, these programs the SHAM AND SCAM that they are. Then we might take this country back otherwise this country is going to look like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Dehli, Mexico City and aren't they just lovely, clean, beautiful well run economic boom sites.
The Badlands just keep creeping further and further afield.
THIS is what happens when John Street's liberal Democrat "brothers and sisters" are in charge.
Ah, someone who's missed the PC re-education camps; don't worry, they'll be coming for you shortly. Hint: PC catechism dictates that decisions to reside and/or associate are not based on economics, family, schools, safety, etc; they are based on race avoidance.
No kidding, we have to keep moving further and further north to get away from the "inner-city blight". Pretty soon the Upper Penninsula will be the suburbs of Detroit.
How many crimes have occurred in Detroit's cemeteries, I wonder?
The ol' charge "racism" is wheeled out for the billionth time. It's as hokey as the charge of "witch" was in Salem, but this is the best liberalism can do, and look at what it produces.
"White flight" left blacks in charge of blacks and Detroit turned to crap.
"...Crime is high and so are taxes
Another connection to the population loss that they seem unable to make!..."
Detroit is what Memphis, Tn is becoming. If the voters keep re-electing King Willie Herenton mayor, the citizens that can will leave Memphis for area with less crime and lower taxes. That is already happening. Herenton is real estate agents dream. Desoto, Marshall, and Tunica counties in north Mississippi ar booming with ex-Memphians voting with their feet getting away from Willie World. As for Detroit, if the politicians running it weren't so corrupt, it would be a nice place to live. Political corruption and crime rates seem to go hand in hand. We have it here in Memphis.
Now is the time for government to sieze land in the interest of economic growth. Don't wait for the property owner's okay. Like NIKE says, "Just do it."
The city looks that bad, but you'd be very hard pressed to find that many white people anywhere in the city. Not being racist about it, there just aren't any, and as a young white man, I got a lot of sidelong glances whenever I'd visit.
My brother live in MI. Their neighbor is a women who grew up in detroit in the 1950's and 60's. Her parents sold their home in the late '70's or early 80's due to crime and moved to the suburbs.
She said she always cries when she goes back to look at her childhood home every so often. She said it was a wonderful place to grow up in and very safe with wonderful memories.
Excellently portrayed in the film "The Crow" (circa 1994, starring the late Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee's son, who you may remember was killed during filming by a bullet fragment mistakenly left in a stunt gun.)
Atlanta/Fulton County/DeKalb County (all democrat/blue county black hole of government money and misuse and corruption) charges city taxes as well.
Quote: "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."
My brother has a client is one of the bad areas of detroit-small manufacturing comnpany. The business has no windows and has a fence around it like fort knox. They always tell him to come see them in the morning hours like 8:000-9:00 and too be out of the area by 12:00 before the populace starts waking up.
>Lead in bricks?<< Creeping in through windows?
Sounds like Jethro Tull lyrics.
They need more liberalism.
Parts of Philadelphia are horrendous. I took a SEPTA train to visit the City Zoo and passed thru extended areas of the worst slums I've seen. Nearest stop to zoo was about two blocks down from the zoo and honest to heaven, I wished I had a gun or baseball bat for protection, it was so scary. Buildings that looked like the bomb had dropped. I was glad I had a friend with me, but we both felt antsy.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.