Posted on 02/11/2011 9:28:43 PM PST by wheresmyusa
AMID THE animated rodents, smushed test-babies, snack-food perversions, and crude humor of Sunday’s Super Bowl ads was a powerful, two-minute homage to Detroit, America’s most abject city. Over a pulsating soundtrack of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,’’ viewers were treated to panning shots of some of Detroit’s lovingly restored landmarks from the days when the auto industry made it the richest city in the United States. Today it is the poorest, with a 36 percent poverty rate.
Far from avoiding its grim, rust belt image, the ad — ostensibly to introduce a new Chrysler luxury sedan — celebrated the city’s guts-and-grit industrial base, its smokestacks, its hard times. “It’s the hottest fires that make the hardest steel,’’ the narrator intoned.
It was a goosebump moment for sure. But it will take more than an appeal to regional pride to save Detroit, home to 80,000 abandoned buildings and an unemployment rate of 29 percent. It will take a national urban policy the likes of which the United States hasn’t seen for 40 years.
Detroit is only the starkest symptom of decades of wholesale disinvestment in the nation’s older urban centers. The same conditions obtain on a smaller scale from Trenton to Buffalo to Lawrence. “If you don’t have a platform of national policy you’re really sailing against the wind," said Bruce Katz, vice president and director of the Metropolitan Policy program at the Brookings Institution.
But Katz would broaden the lens to include a new economic plan for the whole nation. For too long, he says, America’s economic policy has focused on consumption, home ownership, and the financial industry.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Wouldn’t “Smart Contraction” be more accurate?
The only thing that can bring Detroit back is liberty. I’m not holding my breath.
Cusp of collapse.
Detroit passed the tipping point back in the Sixties. It’s too late to do anything but plow it back into the farmland from which it emerged a century ago.
Uh, Detroit is the RESULT of that policy.
I guess i should have added a barf warning or /sarc or something, this is a terrible joke.
That is just sad. You can tell that those houses were nice places in their prime.
It’s called White Flight.
Ping.
It didn't give me goosebumps. Instead my inclination was to hurl when the spot came on.
True. I was just being polite.
smart growth=socialism
Yes, that's absolutely right. Hmmm...I wonder what caused the good, productive people to flee? Hmmm....dare we say it even here on FR?
Nobody wants to admit that when technology allowed companies to operate from less urban areas (where they wouldn’t have to house, feed, and “educate” a large population of our permanent underclass with tax revenues), then the city model was doomed. Terms like “city cooling centers” (where ghetto people are supposed to go when it gets hot in the summer) duidn’t even exist ten years ago; now Nanny State will monitor your body temperature in addition to providing you with housing, food, etc.
As long as we don’t have these discussions, our cities will continue to rot while our government pretends they aren’t, and “normal” people will be indifferent while pretending to care.
Is this guy serious?
Or is this a joke?
Socialism is why Detroit is a hellhole.
More Socialism will make it WORST, not better...
Big government plus unionism equal Detroit. I defy any
liberal to rebut this.
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