May his soul rest in peace.
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.
Oh yeah. Detroit is the only city I've ever worked in that takes taxes from you. Like it was a privilege to work there. They should have given me combat pay to come there every day.
Oh, the horror!
Homeless homes!
Exactly and that prevailing attitude is why Detroit will continue it's downward spiral, of which it only has about two more spins before it completely implodes anyway.
"blacks are the favorite target of liberal do-gooders, so it's no wonder that their family structure is destroyed, their youth are stuck on the streets, and their mothers are stuck in a cycle of welfare."
- Very good observation. Too bad all blacks aren't as smart as some...like Bill Cosby. But I guess he's a racist too. </sarcasm>
Is it any wander folks on the west side of the state refer to it as DeToilet ;-)
As, this reporter points out, 83% of Detroit is Black; so I guess we know who is committing the crime there -- White's are sneaking back into Detroit to commit crime from Suburbia.
What part of "move" do these people not understand.
Didn't Robocop supposedly take place in Detroit? Wonder how it looks now compared to that movie.
I prefer "a shining example of the truth about socialism"......whats left of the "working class" are also fleeing to the suburbs such as Eastpointe, Warren and Roseville.
I can't see any future in Detroit. The downtown area is trying to lure upscale people by building expensive condos and townhouses but there is no infrastructure to support it. Once you leave your complex, you are taking your life into your own hands. I think most of the people who have bought downtown probably work in the Renaissance Center area.
There were some condos built on Woodward Ave. by Ford Field that my sister tried talking me into buying. What she had no idea of was the traffic that I would have to put up with driving out to Troy where I work. A Nightmare!
I attended a ballgame down there last fall and the bums that were hanging around the street outside of that condo community were incredible. That is NOT the type of place where I would feel comfortable living in a $200,000 + condominium..............
Detroit stinks and it is dying.........
May his soul rest in peace.
Robocop was set in Detroit but filmed in Dallas. Go figure.
Southfield...
The city should offer to give the home to her.
With apologies to Johnny Carson; "I did not know that."
Herein lies the key.
Detroit (or anywhere else) is permanently beyond hope so long as the instinct for survival is dismissed as a character or cultural fault.
We seem to have a fatal cultural problem similar to islam. Only in a totalitarian state can you force large groups to expose themselves to mayhem and murder for a "higher" goal, be that goal saving a city or saving a subculture.
First the subculture must save itself. Expecting the rest of the universe to sacrifice their most vulnerable, the youngest and the oldest, in order to save a city, or even a neighborhood, is a hopeless task. And forget asking for volunteers. You will always get a few, the dimmest of the dim, to try but the results will always be the same.
A mindset that requires the conscious sacrifice of lives is simply not going to happen. The word "hopeless" continues to exist for a reason.
Some things are hopeless.
Actually you don't have to involve the fire dept. For years Detroit has experienced "Hell Night" which was the night before Halloween. People set abandoned buildings on fire all night and kept the fire dept. extremely busy. I don't know how this started, but it has gone on for years. It is rarely reported in the national news.
Downtown has some nice restaurants but the traffic and parking is horrendous. Plus you have to drive thru any given war zone to get there. Except for hockey, there is nothing downtown that you can't find in the more upscale cities like Troy or Birmingham anyway.....
This winter's Super Bowl is going to be fun to watch. Who the hell wants to walk around downtown Detroit in the middle of the winter? I suspect most of the people coming to town will be staying in the suburbs anyway. A super bowl in Miami is a hell of a lot more attractive than a super bowl in downtown Detroit...........
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