Posted on 06/19/2015 2:15:44 AM PDT by Cronos
DETROIT may be one of the only cities in the rich world where it is possible for someone on a fairly modest income to buy a street. At the edges of Boston-Edison, a historic district of gorgeous old houses built as one of the city’s first wealthy suburbs, so low has the cost of housing fallen that fairly grand houses can be acquired simply for the cost of back property taxes.
..Chief among the costs that are higher in Detroit is transport. One of the reasons people who live in Manhattan don’t mind paying so much for housing is that they don’t need a car to get to work. But in Detroit living without a car is all but impossible. The city is so big and spread out that getting to work on foot or even on a bike would be miserable even when the weather is good . Buses are infrequent and take odd routes
What applies to cars also applies to other things people in most cities take for granted. In the whole of the city there are just 38 grocery stores, almost all of them independently owned. As Lisa Johanan, a local activist, puts it, “Detroit is a food desert”. Most people rely on “party shops”—liquor stores which also sell crisps, popcorn, frozen pizzas and the like—or else petrol stations to get food, often paying with food stamps. This is partly because, as George Orwell wrote in The Road To Wigan Pier, “When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'.” But it is also because the sheer rate of theft in the city makes it difficult for any traditional grocer to survive.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
They’ll sell off property for back taxes, let it get built back up and then tax the hell out of it again. Who knows? They might even take the ones that are valuable and resell them at a higher profit. Declare the area blighted.
Its a give and take situation. Other things are cheap in Detroit. People transferring from Boston or NY that I know say that making a high 5 figure salary in Detroit is like making high 6 figures or more elsewhere.
The trick is to find a neighborhood close to downtown that is on the rise. The closer you get to downtown the neighborhoods are getting better but naturally they’re becoming more expensive.
I read an analysis of why Detroit can’t be rescused. People move to where the jobs are and employers move to where the employable people are. Detroit ran out the businesses with high taxes. The people left because the places to work left. Now the remaining people are, for the most part unemployable. Even if the city gave land to companies and didn’t tax them, the land itself would require a huge amount of capital to clean up the mess and chemicals and make useable. Then, there’s the problem of no employable people, no infrastructure and no services. If you have a company and want to relocate there are limitless places with cheap, clean land and plenty of potential workers.
Actually the population is slowly being replaced. Detroit has become a tech boomtown with guys like Dan Gilbert (Quicken) who has imported some 12,000 people from all over the USA. There is a LOT of foreign investment going on as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-_uX2ZfqRI
I looked up the then current CEO of the Detroit tech effort Leslie Smith. She lives outside Detroit. I’ll bet that even if the tech companies locate there the employees so vital to the tax base will live elsewhere.
http://www.whitepages.com/directions/3c7fbc7a-faf4-4ea5-a30b-1de0780c4edd
When I worked for GD in Sterling Heights I was warned to never get off the interstate in Detroit. If I found myself in Detroit always leave maneuver room in front of your car so you can floor it in case of a car jacking.
There was an article on FR yesterday about the many, many dangerous places in Michigan. If tech companies are locating there follow the money. I smell crony capitalism.
The tax issue remains the same. You can locate a company building in Detroit, but if there are no good schools and no grocery stores, spotty fire service and two hours to get a cop, the highly paid people will live elsewhere.
When I was recruiting engineers to move to Tallahassee, a really nice smallish town with theaters, concerts and two universities it didn’t matter how much money we offered. The wife would arrive, sniff at the place and tell her husband she wasn’t moving here. I finally convinced the company to bring wives on interviews. We got employees but never the ones we really wanted. Now, imagine that wife arriving in Detroit.
They won’t send their kids to school in Detroit.
At a music festival some years ago in Milwaukee I ran into a guy who worked in Detroit. I asked him if it wasn’t a little dangerous. He said yes, but he never went anywhere without a firearm under his car seat. I wonder if that’s a common practice for many Detroiters and people who live around Detroit who have to go into the city for work.
Detroit is a national leader in the area of school choice with nearly 70 charter schools currently in operation with Detroit parents on waiting lists to get in.
Detroit is expensive because you have to keep replacing things stolen from your house.... Inside and out..
These are not grocery stores as most of us think of them. They are small, independent stores owned by Chaldeans (Christians from the Middle East). Prices are high due to reduced competition, security and shrinkage. Choices are limited.
Recently a large chain, Meijer, opened a full service Walmart like store within the city limits. It was headline news.
There’s serious metal fatigue in all the load-bearing members, the wiring is substandard, it’s completely inadequate for our power needs, and the neighborhood is like a demilitarized zone.
I was astonished at the number of employees in Sterling Heights who said, “Oh, it’s not that dangerous, I’ve been there lots of times.” They suffer from normalcy bias. I’ve done something presumed dangerous and nothing happened to me. But if the probability is, say, .1 then it is likely you can do whatever it is several times, perhaps for a lifetime and nothing will happen. But the statistics say it will happen to somebody and the odds are lots better than winning the lottery. People never believe bad things will happen to them.
My mother said if you don’t want bad things to happen stay out of places where the bad things happen.
Homicide in Wisconsin is pretty rare outside Milwaukee. Some gun rights activists might say it's because of the guns, but more like most of the population is civilized.
That’s my point. Cities are always more violent and have been since biblical times. It really doesn’t matter what state or city you’re talking about, the trend still holds.
Setting that aside I would still rather live in Detroit than most cities based on the freedom alone. Its not a particularly liberal city in the social sense. You don’t have food nannies whining about what you eat or drink. Open and concealed carry are legal pretty much everywhere and you can defend yourself with lethal force in the home and in public. You’ll never see a church shooting in Detroit like the one in Charleston because most Detroit churches allow guns.
what makes for a worse place to live?
Unaffordability or high crime (or a combo of both?)
I explained that generally speaking, places that have one or both are most often places run exclusively by Democrats for 20+ years.
Why did Detroit happen to begin with? How did it do from prosperity to the gutter?...well the weight of the people who sunk it is still there.
So, if Detroit auctions everything off and normal people who want to be prosperous move there...the same thing is going to happen again all for the same reasons. The only way to solve the Detroit problem is geographically separate the "Third-Worlders", as I call them, from the areas that will be intended to prosper.
The people who have left the cities and northern states understand that. Unfortunately they do not understand completely why it is this way, partly because Economics is not taught properly and also because of political correctness.
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