[cripplecreek]

The free press building sold for a little over $4 million a couple weeks ago and the David Scott building sold for nearly $9 million last week.

Big money is investing heavily in Detroit but the real economic drivers are the small businesses which still face too high a mountain.

[Springman]

Bump.

[blueunicorn6]

I wonder why they aren’t forcing the inner city Democrat voters to pay their property taxes?

[gaijin]

Detroit’s “Operation Compliance”

The city is cracking down on small-business owners in terms of zoning, permitting, etc.

Shutting down many, many small businesses:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NMHArXwjHM

[BitWielder1]

As someone else pointed out: The Parasite Killed The Host.

[Cyman]

That same damn Romney 47%

[DeWalt]

That 47% seems to be a universal number when it comes to taxes.

[alloysteel]

Raze the abandoned houses and put the land into growing corn and soybeans. As farmland it would be far more valuable than vacant and unsalable house lots.

What to do with all that scrap lumber from the teardown of the abandoned housing and industrial base? Not into a landfill, but into a power generation system that uses something called Plasma Trash Reduction, and as a byproduct, generates electricity on the spot.

www.theplasmasolution.com/index2.html

(cut and paste)

This is “green energy” on steroids, and one technology that actually lives up to its hype. At one swoop, highly toxic industrial waste is neutralized, otherwise irrecoverable resources are freed up, vast quantities of trash that would otherwise end up in a landfill are put to productive use, and the co-generation of power from both the syngas produced from the process and capturing the heat energy for additional power generation make the system self-sustaining, so long as the feed of trash as “fuel” proceeds on an adequate supply basis. Existing landfills and “brownfields” are stripped of soil pollution potential. A side product is the formation of a silica “slag”, a form of igneous stone that may be crushed to aggregate, or formed into building material. Depending on the nature of the trash put through the process, this slag may also be a valuable ore for reclaimed metallic elements, as the various elements tend to crystallize out in different strata within the slag, making the concentration much more uniform than found in typical mined ores.

A whole new industrial complex may be built on the ruins of the former industrial complex. And the landscape will be transformed into one of reclaimed utility for multiple non-industrial purposes.

[No Truce With Kings]

How did Detroit go bankrupt?

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

[Iron Munro]

[caveat emptor]

From what I have read racial politics was a major factor ensuring the demise of Detroit. Here's an excerpt from a letter to Powerline Blog:

...it was pretty clear that everyone gets it that the unions were probably the single biggest economic factor in the decline of the city. However, there was elephant in the room that no one seemed to want to talk much about and that is the role of race in the culture and politics of the current situation. I would submit that it was also a huge factor in the decline of Detroit and will, sadly, probably be the factor that will derail any rebound. The politics of race in Detroit are poisonous and I lay that at the feet of Coleman Young......

The second technique he used was to keep race relations at a boil. When I moved here in 1978 the Detroit metro area was almost unbelievably segregated. Most suburbs, with a few notable exceptions, had only tiny black populations. Almost all the blacks in the metro area lived in the city and almost all the whites in the suburbs. My first drive up Jefferson Ave from the center of the city into the Grosse Pointes was eye opening. Within 3-4 blocks it changed from a filthy street with abandoned buildings and rundown store fronts covered with graffiti and protective steel gratings to a tree lined avenue with large well maintained homes with immaculate landscaping. There was a virtual Maginot line at the border of Detroit.

Young was a master of exploiting this divide and creating friction with the “suburbs” (dogwhistle for “whites”) and regularly used this to foster a “them (white) vs us (black)” mentality in his voter base. He was always the guy standing up to “the suburbs” and they loved him for it. He was mayor for life. Sadly, this technique was extremely effective, to the point where it not only worked on blacks in Detroit, it also worked on the whites in the suburbs. To this day, almost twenty years after Young left office, the animosity is such that any cooperative endeavors between Detroit and its surrounding communities are always fraught with a significant dose of racial politics. Blacks always think that whites want to take over and whites don’t see any benefit in doing anything that helps the city.



Opinions may vary. Don't blame Coleman Young.

[LibLieSlayer]

All those pretty little words to say: COMMUNISM!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Truth2012]

Racist Coleman Young
Crack Heads
Gang banging

That is all

[Teacher317]

The Free Press analyzed the city's finances going back to the 1950s, when its population was 1.1 million more than it is today,

That's a little misleading... one might surmise there are a million left today. In fact, there were 1.15 million in the 1950's, and there are only 55,000 today. Over 95% gone.

[RetiredTexasVet]

I would suspect that they just made up property valuations and the foolish 53% paid theirs while the 47% (familiar number) just ignored the tax bills.

[nascarnation]

Detroit is just going over the debt cliff a few years before the country as a whole.

It will be good to study the winners and losers.

[BunnySlippers]

Good post!

[lowbridge]

They elected Democrats.

The End.

[TBP]

In a word, liberalism.