Detroit Urban Renewal Without the Renewal

New York Times ^ | July 7 | JODI WILGOREN

[Conservative Chicagoan]

What a pathetic place!

[parsifal]

Perhaps the whole country could ship its homeless people there. That way they could have homes. parsy.

[Conservative Chicagoan]

LOL

[Conservative Chicagoan]

An even better idea! I like your name!

[gohabsgo]

I live there till 1982. It is so far gone, nothing can change it. The "civic pride" the mayor talks about, and God Bless him for trying, starts with the people, the vast majority who have been conditioned to believe that their plight is someone else's fault. It's civil rights, opportunistic rhetoric on racism, and intentional dumbing down coming home to roost.

[Conservative Chicagoan]

I agree with you. Black radicals like Coleman Young are to blame for this.

[JimRed]

After campaigning on a promise to raze 5,000 houses by September, Mr. Kilpatrick, has so far seen only about 1,000 come down.

This sounds like an opportunity to put a lot of non-violent criminals to good use. Try using them "chain gang" fashion to demolish the buildings. Of course the union thugs will scream in protest, but they'll still have the "skilled" positions like driving, heavy equipment operators, etc.

Put in honest effort, earn time off your sentence. Screw around, lose the opportunity.

[Kermit]

"Al Fields, the mayor's deputy chief operations officer, who is overseeing demolition, said Mr. Kilpatrick's ambitions had been frustrated by a bureaucracy in which permits and inspections were spread over four agencies, and by a limited budget for $10,000-a-pop demolition."

Gee, just imagine what it takes to actually build something in Detroit. And they wonder why Detroit has been going down the tubes for 45 years. D'oh!

[cgbg]

Detroit, the nation's 10th-largest city with 961,000 people — down from 2 million in 1955 — may just need right-sizing.

(cgbg takes out his calculator...)

The city lost 23,089 people per year since 1955 so at that rate by 2042 the place will be totally empty!

Think of all the Federal and State money this will save.

Why bother to demolish anything. Just let it rot--a permanent museum to the stupidity of liberalism.

[NoKnownPurpose]

We live in Grosse Pointe Park which is about 6 blocks from the DMZ... ;)

It's eerie actually to go from the well-maintained $200k+ homes in our neighborhood to streets where 3 out of five houses are either gone or burned out shells. Almost every night you can hear the crack of 9mm's being fired at who knows what.

I've often thought that the Grosse Pointes should annex a portion of the land from Detroit, tear everything down and expand their tax base.

[Springman]

Bumb for latter.

[AK2KX]

Ahh! Another Pointer! Have you made the acquaintance of Hillary's Lovely Legs? She's another one of us...

I was mulling that over several years ago. GPP should annex everything from Mack and Alter to Mack and Conner, then down to the river. That would effectively triple the size of the city. Oh, and then the Pointes need to be annexed by Macomb County. Being a part of Wayne County, we are taxed to support the community college district, but my city sends only a handful of students to that inner city school. Last I heard, one of the Pointes was paying something like $577,000 EACH per year for the two students who actually took classes at WCCC.

[VOA]

What a pathetic place!

As Ken Hamblin "The Black Avenger" says of the time he spent in Detroit before
he became a radio talk-show host:

"I did a tour of duty in Detroit."

Detroit is one city I'd refuse to move to, even at the risk of poverty.

[waterstraat]

The city lost 23,089 people per year since 1955 so at that rate by 2042 the place will be totally empty!

At the turn of the century, Detroit was one of the most desireable places to live in the entire world. Detroit had one of the highest standards of living in the entire world. Detroit was one of the safest cities in the world. Businesses climbed over each other to move there. People came from all over the country, and all over the world to move to Detroit. Detroit was a great city until world war 2 - when the demographics changed dramatically.

Until drugs are legalized and crime is eliminated and the bars come off the windows and doors, Detroit will continue to rot. Nothing will reverse its decline until all races want to move back into it, until all races want to visit it and spend time there. At the moment, there is no race that wants to move into it.

It would not be hard to make Detroit great once again, but no current leader in Michigan seems to want to. The fact is that the cost of living is very low in Detroit, its geographical location is outstanding, housing prices are dirt cheap, and millions of people would be clamboring to get into the city if a few simple changes were made.

First and foremost, open up Detroit to all races. As a black city, it will not survive.

However, as a modern metropolitan city, with whites, asians, Euorpeans, a constant stream of foreign and american tourists, as well as blacks, it will thrive as it once did before. Secondly, end all drug crime and drug gangs by legalizing it, eliminate the city income tax, make the city safe to walk at night, bring in a few great attractions like a Ceadar Point amusement park on Belle Isle, have great lake ship cruises docking at Detroit, boat clubs on the Detroit River, restore the old historic buildings and forts as tourist attractions, allow businesses that would attract people to want to spend time there on weekends and at night after work, have a rapid transit system, let miniature golf and other small attractions spread out from the downtown area, let big name entertainers come to Detroit instead of Pontiac and Detroit will boom.

Anything can be done if you are willing to do it. If you can make a Las Vegas out of the desert sand, you can do anything to a city if you want to.

[jammer]

... but the high likelihood that little will go up in their place.

Ah, yes. Many companies would love to build in a third world country so they could pay--not "slave" wages, but union wages to a populace that is so stupid that it voted overwhelmingly for a candidate who wrote that [their primary industry] must be eliminated!

Oh, well, guess they can rebuild by raising more cigarette and liquor taxes.

Confession: I do love the buffet at the MGM Grand Casino, however.

[foreverfree]

Detroit - the city with "Nowhere to Run", in more ways than one. :-) At least that's my perception, correct or not. having never been to MI.

On the other hand, Delaware Co., PA, where I was born and raised, has a scale model version of Detroit, called Chester. (Heck, they even used to make Fords in Chester. They still make hot dogs and toilet paper there, though.)

foreverfree

[germanicus]

Living in Macomb County, Detroit is basically a no mans land to most suburbanites. There are pockets of vitality in certain downtown areas but you encounter blight or danger within a few short minutes of leaving these areas. In contrast, the suburbs are vibrant, lively, economically strong and basically well kept with crime no worse or in some cases better than other large metropolitan areas. During the urban renewal strides of the 1980's, Detroit was left behind in large part due to the racist, socialist then mayor, Coleman Young. His constant verbal barrage, blaming white flight and suburbanites for Detroits ill further alienated the suburbs and sealed off any future hope of small business re-investing in the city. Today there are many Middle-Eastern immigrants who have made some strongholds (businesses/neighborhoods) in the city but their relations with the existing black (majority) population has not been exactly warm. So sad.

[ArcLight]

I used to live in Detroit. I've been to cities in China, India, Ghana, and Kenya, among other places. Detroit is the only city to which I've ever developed a deep, active dislike. The whole place looks like it's been abandoned by the people who still live there. Anybody with brains, talent and ambition left town, and those who stayed behind seem to be the ones who just don't care. I'll never forget how the people who live there take offense when you tell them how dreadful the place is. One gets the impression that they've never been anywhere else in their lives, or they'd know how appalling Detroit actually is.

By the by, one rather odd truth--in the middle of this blighted place you'll find the main Detroit Public Library and, across the street from it, the Detroit Institute of Arts. Believe it or not, both these institutions are superb. Somehow the city managed to keep these two outfits working reasonably well. Those responsible deserve some kind of Medal of Honor for municipal service beyond the call of duty.

[ArcLight]

Oh, I forgot to mention...this Times article has a surprising lapse in research. Back in the early 1990s, when I lived in Detroit, there was a prominent city official--I think her title was ombudsman--who called for doing pretty much what Mr. Kilpatrick is doing right now. She said the empty, derelict neighborhoods of the city should be razed to the ground, and the population concentrated in a smaller area. Then the city could stop providing costly services to neighborhoods that are practically empty and generate little tax revenue.

The idea caused a firestorm of controversy. The British magazine The Economist even wrote about it. It'd be interesting to find that woman--her name escapes me--and ask her about the current plan. The Times missed a good opportunity to do just that.