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.
Detroit can only serve as a textbook example of what happens when the consumers exceed the providers, taxwise. I have always wondered if that "tipping point" is the ultimate cure for all "perversions of a good idea".
Like forced compassion (public welfare), and multiculturalism, and Political Correctness.
Perhaps it is, but not so long as we continue to insist that the major and primary cause of the problem be incorporated into the solution.
Good luck.
I attended a ball game at old Tiger Stadium in downtown Detroit in the mid 80's with some business associates. During the 7th inning stretch, almost everyone in the stadium left. I asked the associates what was up with that, and one of them said "You don't want to be in downtown Detroit after 10:00 pm, if you value your life"
The most expensive part of the process is finding a suitable dump in which to put the trash. And then hauling it there.
Making it go away on-site is never an option.
This obvious, but insightful definition of the problem bears repeating:
They want to prevent you from moving out of slums like Detriot so they can have your tax money to spend on liberal programs that created the slums in the first place.
St Louis does the same thing. Another bastion of Democratic Government.
The city ought to just pancake these places, give the land to the property owner next door, and run a contiguous fence around the enlarged lot. The nearest occupied house should get the land. Once it is inside the fence, the homeowner will maintain the larger lot.
Heck, if I could get one of those beauthiful old houses with a 4000 square foot garden patch next door, I would consider it a pretty sweet deal. But Detroit prefers it's default position of throwing up their hands and whining about the problem, instead of doing something to solve it.
Its because the evil republicans are expelling the tenants using GOP mind tricks... or something like that.
My pet project
They are probably removing the deceased to see if that makes them (the deceased) stop voting for Rats.
It's not only people that live in or around Detroit that are suffering. We own a business in Huntington, WV, one of the biggest problems the city of Huntington has is a terrible drug problem in what is considered the black/crack section of town (which is spreading rapidly, by the way). Almost every day in the paper you read about drive-by shootings, & other violence related to drug activity.
I heard a lady that works in the magistrate's office tell that they arrest people for dealing drugs every day in this area - a HUGE percentage of them are from Detroit & Columbus, OH - she says within 24 hours someone will show up with a wad of cash large enough to choke a horse for this person's bail money & they leave town & are never around to stand trial.
Now Detroit is sending it's problems to other cities as well.
I did substitute teaching in the city and about half the kids were welfare children. I know of several kids who were getting ready to become 4th generation welfare people. They looked forward to the first of the month because that was payday.
This a prime example of what is left over from years of welfare giveaway programs. Socialism/liberalism don't work.
And you too can own your own "City of Detoit©" franchise!
I've always been a fan of .44 law.
To a liberal, not wanting to be mugged, raped or murdered = "Racism"
There are MANY children in Detroit who will never get a job, their parents have never worked and their grandparents have never worked.
I recall reading that. I don't recall on what basis it was measured to be the most liberal city. If it was given this distinction based on percentage of voters who vote democrat, that likely has more to do with 83% of the population being black than it does on what their social views are. Liberalism is a mental disease, looks like Detroit "got it."
High taxes and a mismanaged city? It must be racism.
This brings to mind that scene in Atlas Shrugged where Dagny and Hank visit dying Starnesville, former home of the Twentieth Century Motor Company before its socialist owners bankrupted it, and Dagny sees a man out in the fields trying to push a plow.
The only thing that could possibly fix Detroit is to make the whole city a Federal and state tax-free enterprise zone for ten years. But the Democrats would never allow it.
Knowing our luck, we just know that this is going to be the year, because I have always asked, Who the heck wants to visit DETROIT?
That bail scenario must bring a ton of money into Cabell Co. but alas, it too is run by the Dims!
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