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.
"Crime is high and so are taxes"
But the reason the white folks are leaving in droves is racism....riiiiggggghhhhhtt. (sarc)
That's better. I'm west of US-23. :)
Over 50 years. It was leftist back when the whites ran it too.
That is the problem right there.
Looks like the Republicans' secret plan to destroy Detroit by forcing the people to vote liberal Democrat everytime is WORKING!
"Blacks cannot govern themselves"
There is so much wrong with this idiotic and racist statement I don't even know where to begin.
I will simply this. You are the person the left talks about when they call conservatives racist.
This isn't about racism, it's about crime. Until the left overcomes their "racism" mantra to explain away anything that they can't fix with socialism, they will condemn their ethnic constituents to remain poor and in the ghettoes. Poverty is not the cause of crime, crime is the cause of poverty. From the street corner to City Hall.
There was an article in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about a proposal to develop a "gated community" in central Milwaukee (currently a war zone). This was being promoted by a black Milwaukee church and other developers. The development calls for 24 3 bedroom townhouses, and the article said they already had 36 reservations! It is unclear whether this will be approved because the Fire Dept. and Sanitation Dept. have some problems with locked gates blocking their access.
I was trying to think of something to say but, you've already said it.
bump
For later read.
I've been in a number of those fine old buildings. Too many of them are structurally unsound..big time. Cost to rehab would be far above the cost to demo and rebuild.
Large scale demo projects would allow for new streets and infrastructure, large lots, etc. ie; a planned community project.
"Gated community"
This will keep criminals on foot out how exactly? Unless that fence is going to be REALLY high and topped with razor wire.
My brother in law and his family live in Kalkaska. It's about a four hour trip from Downriver. Three if I'm driving. Hahahaha
Liberalism is an utter failure.
I live in one of it's suburbs. I have no choice but to notice.
But the razorwire destroys the cuteness of the neighborhood.
All the denial in the world...
If I were dead, I'd be sending telegrams to get me out of there, too.
I'll take it one furtehr, I would not be caught dead in "Detoilet"
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