Posted on 08/15/2005 3:32:16 AM PDT by TimeLord
DETROIT, United States (AFP) - Rats or lead poisoning. When it comes to the threats from the broken down house next door, Dorothy Bates isn't sure which is worse.
"When it's lightening and thundering you can hear the bricks just falling," the 40-year-old nurse said as she looked at the smashed windows and garbage-strewn porch. "If you call and ask (the city) about it they say they don't have the funds to tear it down."
There are more than 12,000 abandoned homes in the Detroit area, a byproduct of decades of layoffs at the city's auto plants and white flight to the suburbs. And despite scores of attempts by government and civic leaders to set the city straight, the automobile capitol of the world seems trapped in a vicious cycle of urban decay.
Detroit has lost more than half its population since its heyday in the 1950's. The people who remain are mostly black -- 83 percent -- and mostly working class, with 30 percent of the population living below the poverty line according to the US Census Bureau.
The schools are bad. The roads are full of potholes. Crime is high and so are taxes. The city is in a budget crisis so deep it could end up being run by the state.
And it just got knocked off the list of the nation's ten largest cities.
"Detroit has become an icon of what's considered urban decline," said June Thomas, a professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University.
"The issue is not just getting people in the city. It's getting people in the city who can become property owners and stay property owners and pay taxes."
Perhaps the biggest challenge to luring the middle class from the area's swank suburbs is overcoming racial tensions, said Stephen Vogel, dean of the school of architecture at University of Detroit Mercy.
"Suburbanites are taking the bodies of their relatives out of cemeteries because they're afraid to come to the city," Vogel said. "There are about 400 to 500 hundred (being moved) a year which shows you the depth of racism and fear."
Most American cities have experienced a shift towards the suburbs.
What made Detroit's experience so stark was the lack of regional planning and the ease with which developments were able to incorporate into new cities in order to avoid sharing their tax revenue with the city, said Margaret Dewar, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan.
The fleeing businesses and homeowners left behind about 36 square miles (58 square kilometers) of vacant land. That's roughly the size of San Francisco and about a quarter of Detroit's total land mass.
While a decision by General Motors to build its new headquarters smack in the middle of downtown has helped lure young professionals and spark redevelopment in some of the more desirable neighborhoods, there is little hope the vacant land will be filled any time soon.
In his state of the city address, embattled mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said even if 10,000 new homes were built every year for the next 15 years "we wouldn't fill up our city."
And Detroit is still losing about 10,000 people every year.
One solution Vogel has proposed is to turn swaths of the city into farmland. In the four years since his students initiated a pilot project dozens of community gardens and small farms have popped up.
But first the city has to get rid of the crumbling buildings that haunt the streets, luring criminals, arsonists and wild animals and creating a general sense of hopelessness.
"It's partly a resource issue and it's partly a bureaucracy issue," said Eric Dueweke, the community partnership manager at the University of Michigan's College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
"It takes them forever to find the proper owners of the properties and serve them with the proper paperwork," he said. "They're tearing them down at the rate of 1,500 or 2,000 a year, so they're really not cutting into the backlog in any significant way because that's how many are coming on stream."
Dorothy Bates has been waiting three years for the crumbling house next door to be torn down. There are nine more on her short block along with several vacant lots that are overgrown with weeds.
Bates does her best to keep her five children away from the rat nests, but the lead creeping out of crumbling bricks and peeling paint drifts in through her windows.
The most frustrating part of it, says her neighbor Larry, is that so many of the abandoned houses could be repaired. The foundations are solid. The buildings are beautiful. Or at least, they were once.
I want to survive, therefore I must be racist to avoid SE DC.
Well maybe now folks will have a place to stay during the Super Bowl.
Welcome to the "most liberal" city in the United States.
What's with all the Detroit pieces lately? It's bad enough having to live by it, now I have to read about it all the time too. Bleech.
My husband had to fly there this morning. He'll be there for 3 days. He'd rather go anywhere but Detroit. No offense, I'm sure there are parts of the city he hasn't seen which are nice, but what he has seen, he doesn't care for.
Sorta reminds a person of what happens when the "colonial powers" leave an African country...
"but the lead creeping out of crumbling bricks and peeling paint drifts in through her windows."
Lead in bricks?
Detroit the most liberal city in America:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1463364/posts
I don't know. A couple of well placed sticks of TNT couldn't cost that much.
Another connection to the population loss that they seem unable to make!
"helped lure young professionals and spark redevelopment in some of the more desirable neighborhoods"
If the chardonnay socialists are intent on moving back to the city, perhaps we should too eh? </sacrasm>
on the cutting edge of emminent domain, islamist stronghold...well, all that's irrelevant, i'm sure. But Ted Nugent is from there, that's cool.
"What made Detroit's experience so stark was the lack of regional planning and the ease with which developments were able to incorporate into new cities in order to avoid sharing their tax revenue with the city, said Margaret Dewar, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan."
This is the reason so many are so fond of the concept of 'smart development' and opposed to 'suburban sprawl'. They want to prevent you from moving out of slums like Detriot so they can have your tax money to spend on liberal programs that created the slums in the first place.
Ted moved from here to Crawford, Texas not long ago. One of the last conservative "high profile" people in Michigan took off... leaving us to fend for ourselves.
"Suburbanites are taking the bodies of their relatives out of cemeteries because they're afraid to come to the city," Vogel said. "There are about 400 to 500 hundred (being moved) a year which shows you the depth of racism and fear."
Well... yes, but aside from the crumbling buildings, criminals, arsonists and wild animals, its white people's racism that is keeping people out of Detroit.
no housing bubble in Detroit at least
Bingo!
Sorry, He/s from Jackson. A significant step up..
I don't get it. How is someone moving their dead relatives out of the cemetery b/c they're afraid to go to the cemetery showing "the depth of racism"?
Well, of course! My goodness, that just goes w/o saying, doesn't it?
There's plenty of houaing around it's just not where they want to live.
don't cry. at least you ha-ha-haaaave (snickers)bwhaha Bob bwahah Bob Seeeheeeheeeheeger@!!!!!bwahahahahahahahah@! (just funnin' ya). Oh,and Madonna!!!! bwahahahahahahahahahahahahah!
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
"I'm sure there are parts of the city which are nice"
No there isn't. You obviously have never been there!
Yes, the most liberal city and the most depressing city.
The city is having trouble locating the owners of these properties? I find that hard to believe. Whom do they send the property tax bill to? Besides, if it absolutely, positively must be destroyed overnight, call the Marines. Another solution (and fairly common) is to have the fire department set old abandoned houses ablaze for training purposes. In fact, the city could bring other departments in for training.
I agree. I was there in 2003 visiting my brother in the suburbs and the thing I noticed at the "better" parts of the Detroit city proper was sealed windows on buildings. It's simple to extrapolate on what the really bad neighbourhoods look like...
Correct me if i'm wrong, but I believe Ted Nugent is from Ann Arbor.....or was that Bob Seger??
There are more than 12,000 abandoned homes in the Detroit area, a byproduct of decades of layoffs at the city's auto plants and white flight to the suburbs.
Also, see the remark form some academic hack about "a lack of regional planning" and "tax-sharing."
You see it is really all the fault of those evil corporations and those bigoted white people that have the cheek to move out.
Whose else could possibly be at fault? Honestly now! What coulls you be thinking? I am surprised that you even had to wonder about this for only a second.
Behold, the most liberal city in the country according to that recent study.
Are there any livable majority minority cities?
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Yep.
I don't think Ted Nugent is from Bob Seger.
Timelord...white racism is dead. The only racism I see anymore is from Black America.
Yes it's interesting how wanting to avoid being murdered is a racist thing. Shows just how bad it is when people are having their deceased relatives moved to safer cemeteries.
Yes there are. Unfortunately, each of these areas comprises only about two city blocks each.
Actually I have been there, many times. We used to live in Ottawa Lake. We stayed mainly on the freeways, which were like washboards.
Of course, it's the racism!
Will they ever learn?
taking route 50 from college park to downtown d.c isn't much better. Adams morgan where the rent is high in northwest d.c still has plenty of crime.
Or, why doesn't the city just give it to anyone who promises to raze the old building.
Just like the Arabs blame the Jews for every problem they encounter, black liberals blame whites for every problem they encounter.
Then how would Mayor Kwame and his cronies profit from that?
Yeah, you never heard the expression, "went over like a lead brick"? Or something like that.
Not that I know of--but I don't know about every city. There might be in the south somewhere.
Still, I don't blame the residents primarily: blacks are the favorite target of liberal do-gooders, so it's no wonder that their family structure is destroyed, their youth are stuck on the streets, and their mothers are stuck in a cycle of welfare.
I do know plenty of minorities who have escaped that liberal purgatory, and they're like anyone else in the middle class--the drugs, gangs and crime are not a problem with them.
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