This would go for $750,000 in San Diego.
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.
I new it was something like that.
2. I believe Huntington is only 8% black.
I do wonder who will get the honor of losing to my NE Patriots in this years superbowl?
And they wonder why so many employers prefer to hire Mexicans.
Detroit, a renaissance mixture of Democrats, unions, and victim-hood.
I personally give it a bit more leeway and don't start the delineation until east of A2 & Ypsi ;-)
The super bowl this year is in Detoilet. It should be fun to watch.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'll forward those on to him.
I'm considering that, too, but for entirely different reasons. Since my loved ones are buried on a piece of prime real estate and the Supreme Court Decision on eminent domain, I don't know how long they will remain inviolate.
There's no safety anywhere, really, but I'm going to talk to my sister about moving them to a smaller rural cemetery in a small town that doesn't have much prospects for urban growth or sprawl.
But then again, who knows the changes looming in the next 50 to 100 years? Des Moines is a lot like this, too. Block and blocks of boarded up houses, nice large ones that could have been rennovated. Nobody in their right mind wants to be a landlord, I should say slumlord, any more because who needs all the deadbeats, drugs, graffiti, and property damage done by people who only care to destroy and not build?
This isn't really anything new, but the scope is broader. There are hundreds of abandoned or seriously declining small towns across America, particularly in the west.
This would go for $750,000 in San Diego.
Sad shame that was a nice house in its day.
I encourage everyone to see this satellite view of Detroit and one of the Grosse Pointes. It shows 75% demolished homes to the west, full suburbia to the east.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=grosse+pointe+farms,+mi&ll=42.377521,-82.943065&spn=0.008026,0.021954&t=h&hl=en
Not enough firepower to handle what Detroit has become.
I think he is talking about the Suburbs which technically aren't Detroit.
I think he is talking about the Suburbs which technically aren't Detroit.
Washington, DC and Chicago come to mind.
Chicago and New York both have white pluralities and huge sections of both cities are very wealthy and very safe. Detroit is essentially one big ghetto.
Before you rant - use the spell checker.
I know what you mean and I live just north now. The only time I go into Detroit now is when I have to drive thru it to get where I'm going on the other side of if.
My sister who has season tickets to the Red Wings has stopped offering me them because she knows I refuse to go down there. Same goes for Tiger ball games, I get offered tickets to their games all the time but I refuse them.........
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