Posted on 10/30/2009 1:49:22 PM PDT by AreaMan
Nature is reclaiming the Motor City.
Autumn 2009
We usually apply the word “feral,” which means “reverting to a wild state,” to domesticated animals that are abandoned and must survive on their own. But in rapidly shrinking Detroit, where tens of thousands of structures have sat empty for years, people are starting to describe houses and neighborhoods as feral—that is, as places where human activity ceased so long ago that nature has reclaimed them.
Two Detroit residents writing for the blog Sweet Juniper describe these feral houses as places that “for a few beautiful months during the summer . . . disappear behind ivy or the untended shrubs and trees planted generations ago to decorate their yards. The wood that frames the rooms gets crushed by trees. . . . The burnt lime, sand, gravel and plaster slowly erode into dust.” The bloggers’ striking photos show long-neglected houses completely enclosed in vegetation; only the outline of the architect’s design suggests something created by man buried beneath.
Feral houses are perhaps the most visible sign of Detroit’s long decline, and their troubling numbers are starting to create talk within the administration of Mayor Dave Bing, who is running for reelection in November, that the city must shrink to survive. Bing, the former National Basketball Association great who first won the mayor’s office in a special May election to replace the disgraced Kwame Kilpatrick, recalls how, during the campaign, he would travel through neighborhoods where only a house or two remained occupied on each block, where weeds had reclaimed abandoned lots, and where storefronts sat empty. Today, officials estimate, the city contains an astonishing 70,000 abandoned structures—many of them houses, but also some commercial properties. In downtown Detroit alone, a local newspaper identified 48 office buildings with “no outward sign of life.”
That’s not surprising, considering how many people have fled Detroit over the decades. Over the last half-century, the city’s population has shrunk by 50 percent, from about 1.8 million people to fewer than 900,000. Since 2000, the city has lost 35,000 residents. Detroit officials acknowledge that they see little prospect for a population turnaround soon.
Though any plan to downsize Detroit—a city where people now use only half the acreage within its boundaries—would be complicated, expensive, and time-consuming, it would let the city focus its resources, including crime-fighting and redevelopment efforts, where they could do the most good. The first phase in such a plan would involve tearing down abandoned houses and other empty structures that serve as focal points for criminal activity. But that itself is a daunting task. City officials say that it takes an average of $10,000 to demolish an abandoned house, which makes the city’s long-term tab potentially north of $700 million. This summer, Detroit used federal grants to start the task, demolishing some 226 abandoned houses in areas near neighborhood schools to reduce criminals’ opportunities to prey on schoolchildren.
Downsizing Detroit also presents political obstacles. Officials must identify neighborhoods whose city services would be withdrawn and whose residents would be relocated, a process certain to set off political fireworks. A summer series in a Detroit newspaper quoted some residents of desolate neighborhoods as welcoming such relocation efforts; others vowed to resist.
Yet doing nothing is no longer an option: the city’s economic and fiscal woes are already forcing deep cuts in services. Detroit’s board of education, for instance, resisted downsizing for years and continued until 2007 to operate a school system with a capacity for 160,000 students, even though just 115,000 students attended that year. The hemorrhaging budget finally forced the city to close some 40 schools. But the system still faces insolvency and is even considering a bankruptcy filing. Similar budget crises will require rolling back various other essential services, from police and fire to sanitation.
Though some blame Detroit’s population losses on larger economic forces, economists Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer argue in a groundbreaking paper that the city’s problems are mostly self-inflicted. (The paper, called “The Curley Effect,” gets its name from legendary Boston mayor James Curley, who favored Irish residents and pushed other groups out.) After winning election in 1973, Detroit’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, consolidated his power, driving white residents, who had voted against him, out of the city by withdrawing services from their neighborhoods. Eventually, Glaeser and Shleifer write, Detroit became “an overwhelmingly black city mired in poverty and social problems”—and shrinking fast.
Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of The New New Left.
And the Morlocks are already emerging...
So Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe learned how to destroy cities and countries from Detroit Mayor Coleman Young.
Wow. Just Wow. The pictures remind me of the series on The History Channel about life after man.
Last winter in Detroit.
Kinda dims the dreams of a “vine covered cottage.”
Even the union workers have long since left the city of Detroit. Pretty much all that are left are welfare recipients and the criminals who prey on them.
Sad to say, the riots in ‘67 persuaded huge numbers of people to leave. White residents left in big numbers, and so did big numbers of black residents. Decent black people don’t want to live in a ghetto any more than white people do.
Did they ever do the urban homesteading thing in Detroit? Some cities have had some success with those, where you can buy distressed properties for low prices, in exchange for promises to renovate and live there.
Then again, would anything work for a place where decent people just don’t want to live???????
re: when you let unions and lefties take over and run the place
There’s a lesson here but sadly it will go unlearned. It is patently obvious that America is following pretty much the same path as did Detroit.
I have been to Detroit and I must say that I would not walk around without a gun.
How sad....many in 3rd world countries would die for a place like those to fix up....is this what our grandchildren will be facing?
There is a poignance to the devolution and reversion of Detroit, and I think that blogger found it.
Thanks for that link. Amazing.
Maybe the lots could be homesteaded by urban pioneers. Or leased to people who want to grow crops or something. Of course, the powers that be would have to decide that they want enterprising self-starters living among them. Never mind.
Relocate the people in the neighborhoods and declare the unused neighborhoods in a certain mile radius (that will now be without schools) a “sex offender friendly zone” and there will be an influx of people willing to relocate and purchase (and repair) the homes. Also there will be businesses who see a large influx of residents and will reopen stores in that area (sex offenders have to eat and buy gas too). You will have the stigma, but if there is a large population, you can’t really ‘hide’ in it either. As is it, you don’t know who you are dining next to, but odds are you would be pretty sure in that ‘zone’.
I know people of Detroit don’t want a mass influx of sex offenders, but they have to go somewhere and this is a way to keep a closer monitor on them as well as fix the ‘what do we do with this property’ issue. Also bringing in revenue to the city.
Just a thought.
The City Counsel meetings are a sight to behold.
Its more than just a loss of population there that is the problem.
Pittsburgh has also lost half its population during the same period, and isn’t in nearly as bad a shape.
What a great city it was. Growing up there in the fifties and sixties I remember a sprawling, wealthy, huge conglomerate of a city. Hudson’s...downtown, the Olympia where we watched the Red Wings...Briggs, later called Tiger Stadium...baseball and football.
It all began to end in July, 1967 when the decision was made at the highest levels of city and state government to not protect property during the riot...excuse me, civil insurrection.
George Romney and Jerry Cavanaugh allowed the city to burn...over forty people died anyway...and tens of thousands began to move out. Heck...Sterling Heights, er...I mean Sterling Whites was just farm land until then.
By the seventies when Coleman Young became mayor...he was a black racist...it was game over. Political pay to play became the order of the day, and that never ended. Corruption remains at incredible levels...not that the justice department is much interested.
Those left now live behind bars over their windows and doors. Nine years ago the Detroit Police told me to move my elderly mother out of the city before she got hurt.
I did. She’s safe now...but misses her old neighborhood...not that it’s there anymore.
When I go back and drive through what’s left, only in daylight, I cry. I mean...I actually weep. It’s sickening.
Fifty years of Democrat leadership.
As anywhere else, there are small pockets of “remainders.” They should be allowed to homestead large tracts of the land to do with as they please. The place would be standing tall in a generation. The land is likely fertile, having been unplanted for a hundred years....
Ooops...got the year wrong. I think ‘68 was Watts. The Race Riots were like one long blur to me.
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