[festusbanjo]

Fantastic article. As someone who gets to see the ugliness that is Detroit up close on a somewhat regular basis, I can attest to the fact that it has been a lost cause for quite some time. In a normal market situation, when prices hit rock bottom, some enterprising developer would come in, bulldoze a few square miles, put up a gated, guarded and protected development, be able to sell the new neighborhood at a price that is much lower than suburbia and still make a huge profit. Detroit is so far gone, that even the people that still live there now, wished that they didn't.

[ishmac]

Yes, the ugliness that is Detroit is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't experienced it firsthand. I was a seminarian at Sacred Heart Seminary from 2004-2006, and I have never seen such a disfunctional municipality. It's like something out of the Road Warrior. I grew up on the other side of Michigan (in Niles, a little north of South Bend IN), and have lived all over the world: San Fransisco and the Bay Area, Monterrey, CA, Nurnberg, Germany, Prague, Czech Republic, Dresden, Germany, and now Houston. Detroit is the absolute biggest crap heap I have ever lived in. Dresden (that's right, the city reduced to ashes in the infamous firebombing and rebuilt on the socialist model in the DDR) was a friendlier place to live in. The only time I ever heard more gunfire than in Detroit was when I was in the Persian Gulf. No kidding!! The place is a scale model version of a 3rd world sh!thole. It's as though it's permanently stuck in the 1970's. Never seen anything like it.