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.
That's what "Devil's Night" is for.
Check out the link in post #73
D'oh! posted to myself!
Check out the link in post #73
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.
Liberals run Detroit from the top to the bottom, what's the problem?
The one unassailable liberal touchstone is the desire to tax us into prosperity. So let's get going, raise taxes and raise them again... more freebies and benefits for everyone!
>>"If you call and ask (the city) about it they say they don't have the funds to tear it down."<<
Box of matches, $.75.
"12,000 abandoned homes equates to 48,000 Democratic votes."
But at least those dead people moving to the 'burbs can't vote anymore.
I've been to detroit on several occasions (the company I used to work for is based in their downtown.
It is a pit. Some say it will be our first "ex city". I've posted that here before. It is becoming quite obvious they were right.
I always wondered just how big a ghost town could be.
I understand that Detroit is like a donut: Lots of development going on around the city as the city becomes the hole.
We used to, then someone had the brilliant idea to gather up volunteers on Devil's Night and stop the arsonists. They call it Angel's Night now. I wish the angels had applied themselves to voting out King Kwame and the circus act that is the city council, but there's no end to that freak show in sight.
It may be a little known fact outside the metro area, but one of the major tentpoles of Detroit's economy is the sale of scrap metal. Copper wiring and plumbing, sewer grates, etc. The abandonment of these houses opens up Detroit's rich vista of mineral wealth to our entrepreneurial scrappers.
Friends don't let friends live in Detriot or is that Cleveland?
Detroit. Cleveland has a better public transit system and is better-integrated with the suburbs. It's got lower crime. No notable fires since that unfortunate event with the river. Better academic and cultural community. Great Lakes Brewing Company. (Michigan doesn't even allow microbrewers to bottle their product!)
I'd feel comfortable living in downtown Detroit if I had a car and a CCW, but there's many places in Cleveland where I'd feel comfortable even without a car or a firearm. I wouldn't recommend anyone with a family live in Detroit.
I don't know how they can say Detroit is shrinking. I seem to recall that there are more votes cast in Detroit precints with every election.
Some of them even get 125% of the registered voters to cast ballots.
Oh gosh, I got hit by thread necromancy. Sorry everyone. I feel like a product of the DPS.
Ping!
Detroit sounds like a truly wonderful place to celebrate Kwaanza!
Two things killed Detroit.
The July,1967 riot
The demise of the American auto industry.
Oh,and the abysmally bad school system makes it three.
The author of this piece missed to mention that at this point Detroit has a genuine opportunity and a challenge to show the rest of the nation, that black folks can revive down trodden neighborhoods without "white" interference.
It is right up the alley of the Rev's Jackson and Sharpton, who repeatedly, in various statements blamed the "whites" for suppressing the black ascension on the economical/political ladder.
The obvious answer is that the companies and people didn't like the treatment they were getting in Detroit so they left.
What didn't they like? I'd guess high taxes, high corruption, low delivery of city services and strangling regulations.
Nothing has changed, the current mayor gave his wife a luxury Lincoln SUV vehicle that had been donated for the city's use and then claimed racism when called on it. He then did exactly the same thing with a Cadillac SUV.
Would you risk your life savings investing in Detroit after seeing what liberals did to a once thriving and beautiful city?
The minute you buy one of those buildings or homes the Detroit city inspectors will descend on you with a list of demands for lead paint removal, building permits, demolition permits, unsightliness orders et al that will empty every dime in your pocket.
Unless you have almost unlimited funds and time to wait for honest conservative government it's much safer to invest elsewhere.
Muahahahaa! That involves EFFORT! Those scum will only be begging for handouts. Of course, i do not refer to the working people, because the vast majority of those who would get involved in your plan have already found a way to make a new start.
Racism?
I presume he can establish that crime statistics do not alone justify the fear. . . . . . Yeah, right.
They did it here in Georgia from fulton county. 2 so far and the county could not stop it. all sevices are privitized.
"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."
That's the biggest load I've read in a long time.
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