Posted on 08/15/2005 9:59:30 AM PDT by Pikamax
Shrinking Detroit has 12,000 abandoned homes Sun Aug 14, 5:03 PM ET
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.
Don't forget - "Detroit" means 2 things: the city of Detroit which is down to about 900,000 people, and Metropolitan Detroit, which has about 6 million people.
Most people in Detroit don't live in Detroit.
Downtown Detroit has made an amazing turn around - Lofts are opening up in old commercial buildings and there is construction and a population boom going on in downtown. The casinos are expanding, the old Book Cadillac is being refurbished into condos and the new Riverwalk is attracting hundreds of thousands.
The rest of the city is another story.
Detroit - Where the Weak are Killed and Eaten.
But still, Go Tigers!
Possible, but first it would be necessary to permanently get rid of the Detroit municipality and form a local government that won't kill the golden gosling like Detroit killed the golden goose. Detroit would simply wait for you to pony up, and then tax and regulate you to death like they did to the previous victims owners.
“I actually saw a home in Detroit for sale for a hundred bucks.”
And how many times was that home traded on “Minority” loans before it collapsed?
Here ya go - great investment opportunity:
http://homes.realtor.com/search/listingdetail.aspx?ctid=2959&ml=3&mxp=5&typ=1&sid=c17881c7d11d4f98988541e8b1fe5f29&lid=1083765232&lsn=4&srcnt=301#Detail
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
...Cleveland...
It’s unorthodox, immoral, and probably unconstitutional...but ya know what would turn Detroit around?
Enact a shoot-to-kill policy on ALL crimes. For one year, but don’t tell them that.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
On one hand its whites as absolute devils and the hate crimes fiasco not reaching its logical conclusion of open season on white people fast enough, and on the other hand white people not wanting to be around us pleasant peaceful people. Grow up people
1. Giuliani-style crime control in city, but with one major change: allow business owners to carry guns at all times and remove all restrictions on gun ownership for non-criminals. Pass legislation stating that ANY gun death resulting from said “victim” trying to steal from or kill another person is NOT a crime.
2. Expel all citizens who have recieved welfare for more than 24 of the last 36 months.
3. Abandoned buildings must be torn down or fully remodeled within 18 months.
4. Reduce city income tax by 40%. Create business-friendly tax structure.
5. Call a spade a spade.
Worked like a charm for New Orleans -- Liberal Plantation Capitol of the USA -- the City of Envy. /sarc
What is bizarre, is it used to be one of the finer cities in the country, apparently. The houses are beautiful. My own hometown suffered a similar if much smaller condition. What started it were the riots in the 1960s, believe it or not, and we have never completely recovered. The downtown is virtually a ghost town, and huge pre-depression era houses sit empty, crumbling and decaying. It’s like visiting another abandoned planet, and you’re struck wondering “who were these people to make such wonderful edifice, and who were we to let it all slip away.”
“Here ya go - great investment”
What the Democratic Party did for Detroit, it can do for YOU!!
1) Give the land an abandoned house is on to the homeowner next door if they are willing to tear down the other house. This will reduce the number of blighted homes and increase the value of the homes which are remaining.
2) Make Detroit a city of parks, if 1/4th of your land is unoccupied see if you cant get some key owners to shuffle around and build open space, low maintenance parks.
3) just give away the land, and petition the state for grants and low interest loans for people willing to dvelop it..
None of this will work if your city is not being governed well and they need a mayor like Rudy to come along and make sure no more windows get broken..
Minorities with the cash to get out, have.
The main reasons for the flight are poor schools and very high property taxes. Just like any other business, minorities want the best government services for their (tax) dollar.
Re #1 - are most abandoned homes still owned by someone, or have they been seized by the city? If they’re bankowned ain’t a-gonna be much happening there.
However, I saw a slew of bank-owned homes for under $10k in Detroit. Perhaps offering the homeowner next door that if they buy the bank-owned sh*thole next to them they’ll get a break on their taxes a couple years.
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