Posted on 07/03/2010 9:10:57 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Dave Bing is a true democrat but he sure seems a hell of a lot brighter than the DC marxists.
The real question is, how will you get whites to move into an area controlled by black thugs and gangs? Never mind the leftist politics, it’s simply DANGEROUS to live in Detroit!!
Sure clean out the animals and the Communist Government and let real people back in to rebuild the place.
We actually have a decent Democrat in Governor Bredeson in TN. His is a rare breed: a fiscally responsible Democrat.
Not Colemon.
I left Detroit when he was mayor.
Far better than the one everybody in Detroit wanted: Cazzie Russell
Far better than the one everybody in Detroit wanted: Cazzie Russell
Here’s one of the plans :
Detroit plans to save city by demolishing vacant neighborhoods
This was one of those stories that had me and my producer agonizing over the material left on the cutting room floor. Mostly images that we couldn’t squeeze into our story.
Take our drive with Data Driven Detroit’s Kurt Metzger. He’s the guy who led a team of land surveyors around the city measuring Detroit’s urban blight block by block.
During the drive, we saw recently built Habitat for Humanity homes surrounded by vacant houses. We saw an almost brand new playground in another failed neighborhood. The fence around the pristine play set had fallen and the grass was overgrown. No kids in sight. Our cameras didn’t exaggerate Detroit’s decay. If anything, they couldn’t capture it all.
The old Wayne County office building, a historic landmark, in downtown Detroit has fallen on hard times. The county moved its workers out of the building. Now, only a fraction of the structure is used as a preschool. The rest of the building stands vacant.
Vacancy is a plague on much of the city’s urban core. We wish we had more time to tell the story of Detroit’s once grand train station. It, too, is a sad and empty site. Many of the station’s windows are smashed. It ought to be saved.
There’s also much more that can be said about one of the voices in our piece, the Reverend Dr. Horace Sheffield. If you ever need a history guide through inner-city Detroit, he’s the guy. His father, also a reverend, was a pioneering civil rights leader in the city who marched with Martin Luther King.
The younger Sheffield had plenty of ideas for turning the city around. He’d like to see a summit of church and city leaders search for solutions other than the radical demolition plan put forward by the mayor.
Speaking of the mayor, Dave Bing declined our multiple requests for an interview. His staff said he was simply too busy. It’s too bad. We wanted to press Mayor Bing on how he would have accomplished his goal of demolishing 10,000 dangerous residential structures by the end of his term. This plan will result in the removal of scores of residents. It’s hard to imagine all of them wanting to go. So the painful process of eminent domain, at some point, will likely be part of the plan’s end game.
And finally, apologies to the folks at Hantz Farms. Our interview with the company’s president, Mike Score, didn’t make it into the piece. Hantz hopes to take much of the open space that’s left after Detroit’s mass demolition and turn it into the largest urban farm in the world.
Best of luck to them and everybody in Detroit. The people couldn’t have been nicer during our stay. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again… it’s hard not to root for Detroit.
In most (relatively) thriving areas (ATL for example) the design and construction of major transportation network improvements is very expensive and takes forever, in part due to right of way acquisition costs. (e.g., the "Northern Arc" project in ATL.) Detroit, due to its complete implosion, offers an amazing chance to purchase right of way cheaply, perhaps to build, perhaps to land bank for future use. If you just linked the contiguous abandoned properties you would have amazing amounts of green space. This should be looked at as an opportunity to establish the foundation of Detroit 2040 (or 2050) and re-segment the status quo.
For those who haven't been to Detroit lately - you really should talk a look at the urban exploration site http://detroiturbex.com/. It will just blow you away. Hard to imagine a city contracting so rapidly that schools are abandoned with books left on the shelves to rot, rather than being shipped off to schools which remained open. Looks like Chernobyl.
It was a great city to grow up in, in the 60’s and early 70’s.
The left has brought it to where it is now.
I was back in my old neighborhood (or what's left of it) in April.
As I drove down the street a pheasant flew over my car.
A PHEASANT!
I also saw a couple dead opossum and raccoons.
The animals have taken over.
Yes, how do you get decent middle class people to move back? It’s not just whites who moved away. Middle class blacks also have fled Detroit and other cities. How do you get the middle class and small business people to come back?
Dave Bing was, and is, a Democrat...
Full stop. This enterprise is doomed. The central problem in Detroit isn't the crooked Dem pols, it's the crooked voters who put/keep them in office. IOW, the problem with Detroit is the Detroiters.
A perfect microcosm of the entire country that elected Obama.
Yes, how do you get decent middle class people to move back? It’s not just whites who moved away. Middle class blacks also have fled Detroit and other cities. How do you get the middle class and small business people to come back?
Detroit and many other cities have gone “ghetto”.
Didn’t Detroit really start going downhill after the riots of 1967? If too many productive citizens leave, then the people left behind are the underclass.
The images of Detroit are too eerily similar to abandoned parts of the old Soviet as seen a EnglishRussia.
The brother was the personnel director at the Detroit post office. At the same time the federal government regularly sent used up defectors to work at that post office.
The brother could keep track of them for the USSR.
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