Replies

I don’t have high hopes for Detroit’s future. Their situation is not unique, but is scale and the velocity of its decline have made it prominent in the news.

I grew up near Birmingham, Al - and they are going through the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history right now. So I’ve seen how it happens - and I can see it happening in Detroit right now. Admittedly, I haven’t been there in a while; but, you can ‘go’ there with Google Maps - and you can see large areas of vacant lots. Go to the street viewer, and you might see a nice house - but it is surrounded by vacant lots, piles of trash, boarded up houses, or half burned houses. A recent story was about failure to pay property taxes. The reason people don’t even bother to pay taxes is rooted in the extreme lack of value for real estate in the city. Thatis a huge problem.

I work in land development, and I have brainstormed with city leaders before, about how to get new home construction in the existing city limits. The major obastacle - value. In some inner city areas, I could get a lot for FREE, build a house on it, and never be able to sell it. This is because the cost of lumber, sheetrock, etc for a house exceeds the going rate for property in the area. So, you’re stuck - unless you use incentives like TIF districts, people aren’t going to build new houses. And, they aren’t going to invest heavily in maintaining existing housing.

We’ve mailed out surveys and taken polls. The major obstacles to property value in decayed cities (which likely apply to Detroit) are crime, infrastructure, and schools.

Crime - its not necessarily the big stuff. It just wears people down when they have flower pots stolen off their porch, they find needles in their front yard, and somebody steals the copper out of their ac unit.

Infrastructure - Again its not the big stuff you see on the nightly news, like ‘crumbling bridges’. Instead, its the alley that is hardly driveable behind the house, the water red with rust, or the street signs covered in spray paint. It just wears people down.

Schools - The most important one. Its like night and day, the varying level of school quality. And it doesn’t matter if your kids are grown or if you homeschool, your property value is hopelessly tied to school performance.

I should have added another category - options. Some areas, like the boroughs of New York, will never become detroit. Physical geography and commute time prevent ‘flight’ from the inner city. Sooner or later, areas in the cramped northeastern cities ‘come back’. Not even the worst areas of Philadelphia have widespread vacant lots like Detroit. But people in Detroit have options. I imagine pulling up stakes and leaving Detroit, to go to an adjacent city, doesn’t increase commute time by more than 15 minutes. There are alot of nice areas around Detroit...these are the people who found a different option. And, I’d imagine that all the stats about Detroit’s declining population are countered by large population growth in adjoining areas.

This is happening all over the mid-west, where land is plentiful. Like I said, its happened in Birmingham - and there are some geographic barriers there (Birmingham is at the tail of the Appalachain Mountains). My relatives who still live there now put up with hour long traffic jams every morning...and would likely be willing to put up with more.

I have no idea what the solution is....well, I have a few ideas but certainly no magic bullet. But trust me, Detroit’s decline is very real, and based on how other smaller cities have dealt with it, it can certainly get worse. I understand the commercial downtown is doing well - but there is a giant boat anchor, which is the rest of the city, holding it down.