Posted on 08/15/2005 9:59:30 AM PDT by Pikamax
Shrinking Detroit has 12,000 abandoned homes Sun Aug 14, 5:03 PM ET
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.
Will the last person to leave Detroit please turn out the lights....
We shall have all this housing available for the refugees from Iraq that shall come swarming to our shores when the successor to President George W. Bush assumes office and summarily withdraws the US troops from the Middle East.
One day... ten, twenty, or maybe thirty years from now.. Detroit will turnaround and have an urban revival. And people will be saying "I wish I had invested in Detroit real estate in 2005!"
I love these codified statements. The real issue here is black-on-white crime, but of course nobody is going to come out and say that.
Good point...
The legacy of PC multicultural liberalism reaps its rewards.
A few years ago my wife and I were visiting Detroit. Having
a little extra time we decided to drive over to the Grosse Pointe area and drive along Lake Shore Drive. This is an affluent area of Detroit with beautiful homes. We then drove west off Lake Shore to gain access to I-94. Just a few blocks in off Lake Shore Drive we drove thru areas that were completely blighted ... what struck us was the contrast between Grosse Pointe and the area immediately west of it ... the contrast was shocking.
You might be right.
socialists rejoice! it worked! Liberal democrats have done what not even the Klan could do.
"Hey Kwame, lower taxes you dpsht! Who the heck names their kid Kwame? 10 to 1 odds they don't speak a lick of Swahili and couldn't find Uganda on a map."
We think alike. A few years ago we had a young man wearing the green, yellow, and red everyday to work. He was always talking activism stuff, blah, blah. One day I asked him what the colors stood for and he couldn't tell me. I said "figures" and walked away laughing. Just reaffirms to me that the black leaders ( not all of course I mean JJ and Al et. al. ) teach only what is necessary to cause unrest and unhappiness.
The west coast cities, LA, Seattle and SF are paradise compared to Detroit, Chicago, DC. I've recently been to all of them, and there is just no comparison.
The west coast cities are like shinning cities on the hill compared to the likes of Detroit.
I think regional planning translates to "keeping neighborhoods from abandoning the municipality of detroit."
I am sure the politicians are thinking they did not tax them enough.
It's racism when you refuse to allow yourself to be attacked by perps because of their color...
Which of course we say is the reason you won't let perps of color attack you...
We demand that you allow perps of certain racial affiliation to attack you...& you will carry cash and you will not cancel your credit cards before 21 days post theft..
I've been there. Was born in the People's Republik of Kalifornia. Never been back after I PCS'd from Camp Pendleton.
I was referring to the high taxes, high crime, etc, inherent to a lib run area.
Next step: encourage urban homesteading by well armed and trained veterans returning from the Gulf. Gentrify! This to preclude the Muslims from getting the same idea in motion. I'm surprised they haven't started it yet.
I'll bet you two thirds of those below the poverty line are not "working class", but welfare. Until those who actually are working class stand up to the bums and the thugs and turn out the leftist politicos who enabled the downfall, nothing will improve. < /rant >
The Conservitive city is Provo Utah..I think a study between the two is advised for the Democrats...maybe they could learn something.....Religion, family, schooling, job/work, all those ugly consertative ideas...oh and by the way..they work
Looking at the two lists, it amazed me to see the correlation between the most liberal cities, and the highest crime rates vs. the most conservative and the lowest crime rates.
Did anyone else pick up on that?
Hey, why don't we just turn the entire city into a prison?
Oh...wait...it already is!
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