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.
OK, that's a bottom. It doesn't get much lower.
Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston. Places like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. have both bad areas and good areas, and even cities like St. Louis that are unthinkable to people who've never been there have some beautiful neighborhoods with a great quality of life.
Well, the original poster could have been more specific than "majority-minority." All major cities outside of maybe Phoenix are majority-minority or soon will be.
There are issues to be discussed here but the original poster was nibbling around the edges.
I remember hearing stories of people fixing up all those homes...guess that was B.S. eh? I remember working the Detroit Grand Prix in the 90s, and they stationed motorcycle officers along every corner from downtown to Grand Isle. I asked someone why they did that, and they said they were afraid visitors would be manhandled by the locals.
>Lead in bricks?<< Creeping in through windows?
Sounds like Jethro Tull lyrics.<<
LOL
It does!
they should bring back Devil's Night....I remember when they would torch all those buildings....a form of urban renewal....
I know all three cities. I've lived in the NY and Detroit metro areas and have spent a good amount of time in Chicago.
For the most part, Chicago and New York have been pretty blessed with the mayors they've had. Sure, the Daleys and their henchmen have run Chicago like their personal kingdom, but Chicago's mayors have always loved their city. Chicago's always been "The City That Works." I can live with a little bit of greased palms and corruption if the streets are safe, potholes are fixed and garbage gets picked up. With a few exceptions, New Yorks's mayors have been cut from the same cloth.
Detroit, on the other hand, went through 20 years of Mayor Coleman Young, who cared nothing about Detroit as a city. He and his cronies only wanted to get their piece of the pie, and to hell with Detroit and everyone else in it. The city's falling apart? Well, just blame Whitey.
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.
Leave now. You'll want your kids out of that area too -- don't let them grow up thinking of it as "home". Let them meet someone nice in the new town you move to -- you'll be happier having them close by...Of if they go off to college and come home to visit friends, let it be to the new home and city.
How about GIVING the buildings to people who want to fix them up and live in them? Wouldn't that be better than tearing down what are in many cases fine old buildings that could be restored? And wouldn't it be better to have the people OWN something rather than encourage dependence by living rent-free in a crappy apartment?
It doesn't make any sense to me.
They will sale some of these houses to you for $1. But no one is buying.
Hahaha...welcome to the most liberal city in the USA! Be sure to pick up one our official city mascots, the rat, as a pet!
DETROIT, MI 48202 MLS ID#: 25078380 $9,900
3 Bed, 1.5 Bath
1,350 Sq. Ft.
SOLD AS-IS CONDITION. NO SELLER DISCLOSURE STATEMENT. PURCHASER TO SIGN ACR WITH CITY OF DETROIT PRIOR TO CLOSING. PURCHASER TO SIGN CORPORATE ADDENDUMS.
I learned to drive in Mt. Olivet Cemetary. My friends here in Northern Michigan didn't get it until I explained that the cemetary had miles of "roads" throughout and my dad would let us drive around the cemetary to practice. I have many relatives buried at Mt. Olivet and none of us in our right minds would even consider going there. It is a shame, as when we were children, going to the graves of my grandparents was routine.
Not far from Grayling/Kalkaska then?
"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."
Man, that is TOTALY like Salems Lot, or something!
what it really shows is that to have a relatively successful society you need a stable and law abiding citizenry.......
IMO, when blacks move into middle class jobs enmasse, they will become a stable and law abiding citizenry.....
look at most immigrants to this country......they all started at blue collar jobs...railroads, construction, policemen, firemen, industry, bakeries, shoe repair, laundry mats.....
they didn't jump from having nothing to having everything....they were happy to get their foot in the door and have their children and grandchildren make the jump up into the professions.....
seems blacks have skipped that step....they seem to want to go from nothing to being highly paid which can happen to a few but not for most.....
speaking only as a dtr of a shoe-maker.....thanks to parents like mine, we children have been able to do a little better and our kids will do better still....
it takes generations to get to the top, usually , for most families...
Detroit aka New Fallujah has had libnuts is charge for how long?
"Which shows the depth of racism and fear"
IMHO, if these are the same white people that left in this so-called "white-flight" then instead of racism, maybe it's a little thing called experience?
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