Posted on 02/11/2011 9:28:43 PM PST by wheresmyusa
AMID THE animated rodents, smushed test-babies, snack-food perversions, and crude humor of Sunday’s Super Bowl ads was a powerful, two-minute homage to Detroit, America’s most abject city. Over a pulsating soundtrack of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,’’ viewers were treated to panning shots of some of Detroit’s lovingly restored landmarks from the days when the auto industry made it the richest city in the United States. Today it is the poorest, with a 36 percent poverty rate.
Far from avoiding its grim, rust belt image, the ad — ostensibly to introduce a new Chrysler luxury sedan — celebrated the city’s guts-and-grit industrial base, its smokestacks, its hard times. “It’s the hottest fires that make the hardest steel,’’ the narrator intoned.
It was a goosebump moment for sure. But it will take more than an appeal to regional pride to save Detroit, home to 80,000 abandoned buildings and an unemployment rate of 29 percent. It will take a national urban policy the likes of which the United States hasn’t seen for 40 years.
Detroit is only the starkest symptom of decades of wholesale disinvestment in the nation’s older urban centers. The same conditions obtain on a smaller scale from Trenton to Buffalo to Lawrence. “If you don’t have a platform of national policy you’re really sailing against the wind," said Bruce Katz, vice president and director of the Metropolitan Policy program at the Brookings Institution.
But Katz would broaden the lens to include a new economic plan for the whole nation. For too long, he says, America’s economic policy has focused on consumption, home ownership, and the financial industry.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Smart Growth is ... NEITHER!!
Smart Growth? No way, try a SMART BOMB! Couple of megatons should do it!
Also in Wa these days...
I went to the link that Lazlo posted. They showed photos of the Studebaker factory. They closed it in 1956 and the buildings now are 55 years since they were maintained. It is all crumbling.
Some youngsters had videos on youtube of office buildings downtown. They walked through office and one was a stock brokerage. It looks like one day in the early 1970s - they people never came back.
Just about everything was left in the office building. It looks like the photos or Chernobyl or something. It is like the plague of liberalism swept through and people ran for their lives (w**te flight) and abandoned the place on one day. .
Last year or so I ran across a site that had pics of houses that were so overgrown they were like artwork. I am going to see if I can find it...
“It was a goosebump moment for sure.”
Liberals want you to have a goosebump moment — they then think “we got them, they had a goosebump moment.” Just because you had a goosebump moment doesn’t mean you’ve lost your mind. But the liberals have lost their minds and you have to set them straight, “It’s because of foolishness like this that Detroit is a sh*t hole. You guys killed the goose that laid the golden egg and all you can do is think of goosebumps! Give your heads a shake.”
You just can't say the city didn't have great houses. I loved them. And every one was different from the next, which is hard to find these days.
What a ****** waste.
This photo of Coleman Young speaks volumes. Be sure to note the sign being held up behind him:
And don’t forget the birthplace of Motown. Some great music.
And that’s from 1981! Detroit was already a cesspool then.
You betcha they voted for him - probably 100% there.
Some of those houses are awesome. So sad to see them rotting like that.
Bingo.
I believes it. Why any foob switch from Johnny Sunshine to Whipcracker? That’ll git ya kilt! Word brother!
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