[cripplecreek]

I also don't understand why, if these lots were overgrown and harboring danger, the neighbors haven't taken it upon themselves to clear them and report crime? Self-reliance seems strangely absent from those communities.

In the case of Detroit it was the city government that has created and intensified the problem and I'm assuming its the same in Chicago. Touch a property and you become responsible for it including all the accumulated back taxes, fees and fines going back years.

[Gunpowder green]

That’s nuts! It’s also a recipe for disaster, as evidenced by Detroit today.

If someone designed policies that would deliberately gut cities and render them useless, they would look remarkably like what we actually have in place.