Posted on 07/23/2007 4:21:37 PM PDT by goldstategop
Not true. The AFFLUENT and worldly save cities. What saved New York and Chicago were not "families" as those are the folks who (for the most part) fled like hell in the 1960s-1980s.
One urban renewal solution : bulldoze it flat, start over. Every razed, empty building means another chunk of parkland reclaimed. If taxes aren’t paid on it, it’s GONE. Use it or lose it. Simple solution, who has the cahones to DO IT?
Yep, you have beautiful old hotels and a train station that would be thriving in any other city, but are ruins in Detroit.
One of the things that crippled Detroit was that the public employees unions robbed the city blind in the 1970s. It’s fair to blame alot of it on who the government was at the time, but you have to blame alot of it on public employee’s unions. That’s why most city governments fell on bad times in the last few decades, no ability to expand a tax base and increasing demand from public employees unions.
Dallas didn't do too bad under Ron Kirk...
"So, how's that working out for ya?"
(/Dr. Phil)
I’ve always thought that Chicago never really had a flight problem to the extent other cities did, mainly because of Daley Sr. As someone who saw many of the cities in this country, I can honestly say, 20 years ago, I felt safe in Chicago, I didn’t feel safe in New York.
Same with Camden in the People’s Republic of Joisey. When I lived down that way, people told me it was a great city before the riots destroyed it. Seems nothing short of pushing it into the Delaware and starting over from scratch will fix things.
And in the summer when the thunderboomers roll through and knock out all the electricity to everything, traffic lights included? Free for all!
It's the pantsuit.
Re “Windsor being pulled down by Detroit”, cc, not a word of truth to that.
No, not "the Detroit riots." Entitlement. "Tolerance." A bleeding heart for people who left the city with a bleeding head.
Crime under Detroit's Black police chiefs (the city has had several) is at an all-time high, and Detroit Public Schools, under its Black superintendents and school boards (there have been several of those, too), are at their worst, with record high drop-out rates and numbers of illiterate graduates.
Great legacy of Black empowerment. Those race-baiters who accuse Whites of paranoia need to look at this track record, and admit that many White fears are justified.
When Black radicals started the riots, they achieved their goal of driving out White Detroiters, but their separatism only isolated them.
What did they THINK was going to happen? White suburbanites were going to flock into the city to become mugging fodder???
Unlike every other inner city in America, Detroit is not a tourist destination.
That may be the understatement of the year. Compared to Detroit, Folsom Prison is Disney World.
Unfortunatly, this also leads to odd cases such as the fact that I was safer when I lived in the poorest neighborhood on the North Side (Uptown) than in one of the nicest neighborhoods on the South Side (Hyde Park) because the former was "above the line" and in the line of gentrification. Thankfully, Daley the Younger has been proactive in reclaiming the near South and West Sides, even demolishing projects.
You didn't see the areas affected by flight (largely of blue collar families) because most of those areas were on the South and West sides, way off the tourist map. Take a drive down Commercial Avenue or MLK Drive and you will see what I mean by the effects of middle/lower middle class flight.
Thankfully, the affluent (as was the case in New York) remained committed to the city, something that did NOT happen in Detroit, Cleveland, or (to a large extent) Philadelphia, where the wealthy got out early, leaving first the working class and then the underclass.
Notice where they live ~ you rarely see a reference to Detroit outside of the dateline of the writer.
The place is a mess and thanks to a dispute between the Indianapolis City Council and Henry Ford just over a century ago, Indianapolis was saved this horrid fate.
Notice where they live ~ you rarely see a reference to Detroit outside of the dateline of the writer.
The place is a mess and thanks to a dispute between the Indianapolis City Council and Henry Ford just over a century ago, Indianapolis was saved this horrid fate.
Remember the movie Robo Cop? That was filmed in Dallas. Kirk set the deal to destroy that area and build a new arena for the Mavs and Stars, downtown. Ghettos lined Hall street and McKinney Ave was depressed as hell. Now its all upscale shopping, bars, condos, apartments and homes.
Not all of this was Kirk but much started under him. He was of course soft on crime and soft on education but the city council in Dallas is pretty wretched.
Eh...not really. The Lions are 7-8 against the Bears on Turkey Day. :-)
Dallas is predominantly black city?
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