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.
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.
In another city where I grew up...my own family has not visited their own ancestor's graves due to all the years of reports of muggings/armed theft in a cemetery now surrounded by a dangerous community. It's the REALITY that these minorities know that on weekends, workers/staff are not there, giving some semblance of security. For years now the REALITY is that one will most certainly be accosted while tending a loved one's grave. Their is a true and valid reason for the 'depths of their fear'.
Once again these community 'leaders' will not face up to , will not acknowledge who is committing these crimes, that a certain danger does exists in this particular situation. Playing the 'race card' is the easy way out, the coward's way out in explaining their gross dereliction of duty. This is most certainly contributing to the decay of Detroit.
The righteous answer to that would be the answer that worked in the wild west. Everyone not only may, but must, pack. After a flurry of miscreants earning Darwin awards, things will get much more peaceful.
Soooooo... Now it's racist to avoid pi$$-poor schools and drug/gang infested neighborhoods where "the bricks fall from buildings during storms".
Bunch of fricken liberals! They might as well call me a racist too.
Ted is from a suburb of Detroit, same goes for Enamaman.
"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."
They never account for this decline of a once great city in the article but they do manage to accuse whitey, once again, of being a hate filled racist.
It wasn't racisim that forced my father out of East New York, it was VIOLENCE. I know because he raised me and neither he nor any of the men on the block were racist.
Question: If rotten whitey isn't there anymore WHAT is holding Detroit back? He doesn't live there, he doesn't run it and he doesn't vote (in numbers enough to matter) So what is holding the good citizens of Detroit from having a showcase city.
Detroit, what a city. They seem hell bent on NEVER improving themselves by electing (except for Archer) the worst possible Mayors they can find.
Eminem's illegitimate Hindu brother.
So you had to pay Detroit city taxes then on top of everything else then, right? That just kills me. That city makes money hand over fist and it still looks like Bosnia.
Because rotten whitey is no longer living there.
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