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.
Not on your life! Why do they think everyone left in the first place?
I still think we aught to build a wall around Detroit and forget it.
Becki
He should come to West Michigan. It is really nice here. And more conservative, too.
Although lately it seems that many of the moonbats from Detroit are relocating over here, particularly Muskegon.
Becki
Well who has been running this city for the last 50 years?
Go ahead and look. There lies the answer as to why the city that is home to the big 3 automakers (and 10 % of the nation's economy) has been turned into a cesspool of corruption.
Just look! (warning, just looking will brand you a racist)
My father's cousin (a fireman) was shot and killed by a sniper while fighting a fire during the '67 riots. A guy my husband gew up with was knifed to death in Detroit...drug deal gone bad. The sister of my son's friend was murdered 4 or 5 years ago while attending a party at a friend's in Detroit...their family had moved to Troy from Detroit just a year or two earlier.
I've lived in the Detroit Metro area all my life as has my husband. We live in Troy and are considering leaving the area or maybe even the state when the kids are done with school.
Seger is from Dexter, just outside of Ann Arbor.
Becki
It is a shame. The nice parts are becoming all too far between. Guess it's true, you can't go back home. But, I do become hopeful when I see Campus Martius and all that.
I've lived in California all my life.
Back in 1993 a brother-in-law from Europe decided to drive the U.S. cross-country. I decided to ride with him. Our first leg was New York to DC.
When we got to Philadelphia, we decided to get off the main highway and see some of it. We had no clue where to get off and randomly took an exit. After 10 minutes of cruising what looked like Blade Runner territory we backtracked the hell out of there.
I still have no clue what the "other" Philadelphia looks like.
Yep. The Zoo is SQUARELY in the middle of one of the worst areas of Philly. We have a family membership, but I refuse to drive the two kids down and go by myself. I got mugged on the walk from the member's parking lot to the Zoo entrance two years ago, when my daughter was two. Scared the everloving crap out of me.
no housing bubble in Detroit at least>>>>>>>
Yeah, but doesn't it seem odd that nobody is trying to rehab anything to make some money? If its a shooting gallery I guess it wouldn't make sense to do that, but abandoned homes at rock-bottom price, I would think that SOMEBODY would smell money..It must be a war zone.
I remember the riots. By that time we were living in Roseville, but i remember the tanks going down Gratiot and the helicopters flying overhead and the curfew. My father still worked in Detroit at the time and didn't work much during the riots. Many of my relatives still lived in Detroit at that time and I remember by grandmother wouldn't leave her house so my uncle went to stay with her. I have a cousin who is on the fire dept in Detroit and he has such "wonderful" stories to tell! Troy was always the nice area that everyone wanted to move to when I was growing up. It still is, but the burbs just keep expanding and expanding. Where we once went to go 4-Wheeling (Clarkston area), is now subdivisions.
By the way, did you ever cruise Gratiot or Woodward (I'm giving away my age)
There is one border street (Alter maybe) that is Grosse Pointe on one side with noce well kept houses and Detroit on the other, totally trashed.
That's one of my favorite Sunday drives.
ABout 18 years ago, I was doing some contractor work on a for sale house in Detroit. Breathtakingly beautiful, modernized home in a nice stable neighborhood. Selling price $35,000. Same home 3 blocks over in Grosse Pointe, Probably $250,000. I didn't buy it because the nearest grocery store was 10 miles away, and security was a serious concern.
"The right of persons to work shall not be denied or abridged on account of membership or non-membership in any labor union or labor organization. The right of employees, by and through a labor organization, to bargain collectively shall not be denied or abridged. Public employees shall not have the right to strike."
You can move here to Ashwaubenon, WI, lady. Plenty of nice cheap homes available, Lambeau Field is nearby, and plenty of jobs open for experienced nurses.
yes, a lot of people, that rather than take the time to fix things, they paint over it. so if they were selling the home or changing renters it would have gotten a new coat of paint. and since alot of the house are old, there's sometimes multiple layers of lead paint. the brick falls, paint chips and the lead gets airborne.
however the amount of lead in the air is nominal, usualy still much better than the air around a gun range.
oh PLEEAAZZEEEE you FOOL! They dont want to end up DEAD visiting a DEAD PERSONS grave site you idiot!
theres nothing in the article about idiot and corrupt mayors....what a shock
Yeah, they can pitch tents on the new farmland.
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