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.
Y'all will have to get started without me . . . I have a Chronicle gig 6:00 to 7:30 that night!
Let me venture a guess and say someone will eventually declair Detroit a "Federal Disaster Area" and we will have another Katrina-like evac at taxpayers expense. Watch closely, and see who picks up the debts in the future.
Hap's office Christmas party is Thursday which lets us out. :(
You back for good now?
The neighborhood looked like Berlin in May of '45.
I find it interesting that a part of the new bankrupcy code is for MUNICIPAL Bankrupcies.
Yes. Selma, Alabama.
This isn't a Black/White issue. It's a liberal/conservative, marxist/capitalistic issue.
There go the votes.
"declair" ! ? Now that is a dandy of a spelling error!
Punctuation dude. Try this for assistance:
http://www.grammarbook.com/
Mmmmmmmm... d'eclair!
3.9% MI state income tax
3% Detroit city income tax
6% MI state sales tax if you buy anything
3.4% to 4.3% property tax
That's right Virginia, on a $200,000 house you'd be socked for another $6800 a year, on top of your wonderful mortgage payment. The feds will take a third of your income and the locals will take a quarter, leaving you and the bank to tug of war over less than half.
Owning property in metro Detroit is financially insane.
My Favorite. D'clair with a Caffe Latte.
Yes, I suppose you are right.
Still, Detroit's plight is another reminder that civilization is fragile and brittle. Civilization has retreated before and history is littered with such lessons. Not just Rome but 14th century France, 1930s Germany, the Soviet Union, the last thousand years in Persia, the list goes on.
Radical leftist unions combined with equally thuggish Marxist local government brought a once prosperous city to ruin. I trust God alone will forgive the left, I will not.
It should surprise no educated person that "civilized" people of even moderate means are "retreating" from Marxist-run areas such as Detroit (complete with clutched-fist Lenninesque statue).
Detroit has neither weather nor geography on its side to stem the tide. Its downtown land has lost so much value that its "best use" is now considered agricultural.
Well, once you turn urban blocks back into the farmland from whence they came, you've pretty well stated that you aren't in an area that knows how to manage prosperity.
The wealth of Ford and GM has been frittered away into the abyss of corruption and mismanagement that always goes hand in glove with Marxism.
Cuba, North Korea, and Zimbabwe can relate.
"Their solution is not more free trade, but more regulation to try to take money from a captive audience."
Well, you can have too much freedom don't you know. Just read any of the 'free trade' or 'walmart' threads here on free republic. They are replete with calls for limiting your freedom to purchase what you want from who you want.
Yup, so Superman can't peek thru 'em
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