Turn Out The Lights - Largest U.S. Cities Becoming Cesspools Of Filth, Decay And Wretchedness

The Economic Collapse ^ | 05/24/2012 | Michael Snyder

[SeekAndFind]

Once upon a time, the largest U.S. cities were the envy of the entire world. Sadly, that is no longer the case. Sure, there are areas of New York City, Boston, Washington and Los Angeles that are still absolutely beautiful but for the most part our major cities are rapidly rotting and decaying. Cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis and Oakland were all once places where middle class American workers thrived and raised their families. Today, all of those cities are rapidly being transformed into cesspools of filth, decay and wretchedness. Millions of good jobs have left our major cities in recent decades and poverty has absolutely exploded. Basically, you can turn out the lights because the party is over. In fact, some major U.S. cities are literally turning out the lights. In Detroit, about 40 percent of the streetlights are already broken and the city cannot afford to repair them. So Mayor Bing has come up with a plan to cut the number of operating streetlights almost in half and leave vast sections of the city totally in the dark at night. I wonder what that will do to the crime rate in the city. But don't look down on Detroit too much, because what is happening in Detroit will be happening where you live soon enough.

A recent Bloomberg article described Mayor Bing's plan to eliminate nearly half of Detroit's streetlights....

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.

As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can’t afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing’s plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.

What this means is that there are going to be a lot of neighborhoods that will have the lights turned off permanently.

So which neighborhoods will those be?

According to one top Detroit official, "distressed areas" are going to be on the low end of the totem pole....

“You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.”

City officials know that they cannot force people to move from "distressed areas", so they are going to encourage them to leave by cutting off services.

But turning off the lights is not the only way that Detroit is trying to save money.

Recently, officials in Detroit announced that all police stations in the city will be closed to the public for 16 hours a day.

It is so sad to see what is happening to what was once such a great city.

Back in the old days, Detroit had a teeming middle class population.

Today, 53.6% of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

Back in the old days, Detroit was a shining example of what America was doing right.

Today, 47 percent of all people living in the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.

Back in the old days, middle class neighborhoods sprouted like mushrooms all over Detroit.

Today, the median price of a home in Detroit is just $6000.

Needless to say, crime is exploding in Detroit and many families live in constant fear.

Many have taken justice into their own hands. Justifiable homicide in Detroit rose by a staggering 79 percent during 2011.

But Detroit is only one example of a national trend.

For example, a recent article by Jim Quinn entitled "More Than 30 Blocks Of Grey And Decay" described the filth, decay and wretchedness in West Philadelphia. Quinn refers to the drive through this area as "the 30 Blocks of Squalor"....

The real unemployment rate exceeds 50%, murder is the number one industry, with drugs a close second.

As you drive down the 30 Blocks of Squalor you meet the ghost of Squalor future for West Chester Pike. The population along this corridor is ignorant, dependent, and represents the dregs of our society.

But this area was once home to middle class families. There were once many beautiful homes in West Philly, but most of them are now either gone or are crumbling badly. According to Quinn, the physical decay is matched by the social decay....

The once proud homes are in shambles. Bags of garbage dot the landscape. Most of the people who live here are parasites on society. Personal responsibility, work ethic, education and marriage are unknown concepts in this community. Even though more than 50% of the students in West Philly drop out of high school and the SAT scores of West Philly High students are lower than whale ****, the bankrupt school district spent $70 million to build a new high school/prison to babysit derelicts and future prison inmates. The windows do not have steel bars yet, as the architect was smart to put all windows at least eight feet above street level.

One of the great things about the article is that Quinn pointed out how the retail stores in the area reflect the things that the population of the community truly values....

The Chestnut Plaza truly represents what is important to this community. This Squalor Center, as opposed to Power Center, includes a video porn store, cash checking/payday loan outlet, smoke shop, donut shop, Laundromat, and liquor store. No need for a wedding ring store or resume writing service.

Sadly, there are communities like this all over the country. As I wrote about recently, the entire state of California is slowly being transformed into one gigantic cesspool.

Yes, there are still a few areas where the wealthy play that are absolutely beautiful. If you stay in the wealthy enclaves you might never even know that the rest of the state is badly decaying.

There are really good reasons why millions of people are moving out of California. For example, a reader named Peter left the following comment on one of my recent articles....

I am a native Californian ( Im 61) and have lived here all but two years of my life. I can tell you absolutely that this state is not what it was 30 years ago. Cities like San Francisco have gone from being world-class tourist attractions to national disgraces. Los Angeles is a third-world city. San Diego is bankrupt. Even Silicon Valley, despite the recent improvements, is no way what it was in the 90′s. The retail trade is all but dead in this state. Even high-end malls like Rodeo Drive and Ocean Ave in Carmel are full of vacancies.

Throughout the state, good businesses are shutting down and hard working families are selling their homes. The void that is being created is being filled by crime and gangs. The following is a comment that a reader named Roberta left on that same article....

Yep we lived in Oroville CA back in 2007 and it was just starting to get bad then. Montgomery Wards closed, then McMahan’s furniture closed and NOW McDonalds is closing this July along with a grand slam of well known businesses are all folding and pulling out of Oroville or folding lock-stock-n-barrell. It’s turning into a gang town with wide spread rampant drug use. I feel sorry for family and friends that are still their clinging onto the hope that thnigs “will” get better. But I don’t think so.

Perhaps things are still quite good where you live.

Perhaps you think that you will be immune from all this.

Sadly, the truth is that this is just the beginning.

The U.S. economy is actually performing much better than it should be thanks to the trillions of borrowed dollars that Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress have been spending into the economy.

When our debt-fueled prosperity ends, a lot more cities are going to end up looking just like Detroit.

America cannot prosper without middle class jobs, and those kinds of jobs are rapidly disappearing.

Just this week HP announced that it is going to lay off 27,000 workers.

We are losing middle class jobs at a time when we desperately need more of them.

Last year, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor's degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.

Yet our politicians continue to pursue the same foolish policies over and over.

So things are going to continue to get worse and America is going to continue to descend into squalor.

You better get ready.

[Melas]

Wouldn’t matter. We chose the house we chose because we could afford it and it was 2 miles from the hospital where my wife worked. Racial makeup of the neighborhood was never even discussed. Which no real-estate agent who intends to maintain a license would discuss even if you wanted to.

[Ken H]

Better yet, bring Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell. They've made many of the same points.

Now, you have not refuted a single fact I've posted about demographics and crime in US cities. Can you do so... YES or NO?

[Windflier]

Thanks for thinking of me, Melas. I appreciate that.

Truth be told, I don’t think any of us wants to live in a place that we perceive to be dangerous or unfriendly to us. I can certainly understand that. As for myself, I grew up in the racially mixed environment of the military, and moved out of the monolithically black community some 30 years ago.

Still, I’m well aware of those aspects of black culture that are off-putting, and even scary to others. I lived there long enough to be very well acquainted with those aspects of that culture.

Ken, what you probably don’t know, is that the more negative aspects of black culture are perpetrated by a distinct minority of blacks. You’d probably be more comfortable, and find more points of agreement with the majority of blacks than you might imagine. I know, it’s a tough sell, but it’s true.

[Ken H]

Wouldn’t matter

I knew you would dodge my question. Afraid it might undercut your entire argument if you were to truthfully answer?

[Ken H]

Hi Windflier. Let me ask a similar question that I asked FReeper melas. Which would you send your kids to - a public school in a city that was 95% black, or a public school in a city that was 5% black?

[Melas]

Same here. My dad was civil service, but as a result of such we lived in town with no less than 4 military installations. Diversity was just a fact of life. Which is good, because I'm (and I'm sure this will be a shocker based on my reactions) rather racially diverse myself. Embarrassingly enough, When I young I took what my parents told me I was at face value, but none of it was true. They even told me I was part Japanese, I'm not.

Later did my own genealogy, and I'm no part of who they told me I am.I've played it down most of my adult life and just tried to be white and play up my irish roots, where really my maternal grandfather is all Irish, my maternal grandmother half Irish/half Cheyenne survived Sandcrek. My Paternal grandmother half Irish half cherokee, my paternal granfather was never anything legally but a quadroon in South Carolina, although he was properly scot. His mothers race is so unimportant that it just says mulato on the birth certificate leaving both the name of the slave and the name of the scot, blank. For giggles, and I've said it many times. What happens most is I'm taken for Mexican, when I don't have a drop of Mexican blood.

[Melas]

I didn’t dodge anything. I answered as truthfully as I could.

[Ken H]

Let's try this. Suppose you're walking alone at night and your hear a bunch of footsteps. When you turn around, would you be relieved if they were white... YES or NO?

C'mon now, even Jessie Jackson would answer this one!

[SeekAndFind]

That block in the picture does not look too bad to me... just saying.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Let’s try this. Suppose you’re walking alone at night and your hear a bunch of footsteps. When you turn around, would you be relieved if they were white... YES or NO?

Actually for me, I’d be on my guard EVEN if the group of teens were white. There really is not telling...

However if the question were modified to — would you be relieved if you knew that group came out of a church Bible study as opposed to a night club, I would say ‘yes’.

[Trailerpark Badass]

No offense, but the military is not "diverse," unless you are fixated solely on superficialities.

It is a practically the polar opposite of "diverse."

[wardaddy]

Only to have enforced the right to vote

That was the only right at that time enumerated in the constitution blacks were denied either totally or by degree

We...myself included....supported going way beyond that into every aspect of American life and we continue to feed the beast

And what was once decent abour black culture has eroded exponentially
And it has created a climate of distrust, hostility, and contemptuous dependence far worse than what it purported to remedy

[mrsmel]

You hit the nail square on the head! As much as I despise Democrats and their socialist policies, they are NOT the root problem nor the reason for tje decay/high crime rates/ failing schools in these cities. There are Democrat-run cities which in spite of their lunatic over-regulation, etc, do not have these particular problems-or at least not until their lunatic policies (generous welfare benefits, “sanctuary” for illegals, etc)-they don’t have filthy streets, high crime rates ad the rest-UNTIL their liberal policies (especially welfare) start attracting influxes of “Amish”, as we are so euphemestically putting it in this thread.

The Scandinavian nations are run on socialist lines, but they didn’t have the high crime rates, no-go ghettos, vandalism and destruction of infrastructure until they began importing hordes of third world savages.

It’s the same here-there are Democrat-run cities which are as liberal as it gets, but manage to have clean cities, low crime rates, good public school systems-UNTIL their generous welfare policies start attracting the parasites (”Amish”, as we’re putting it).

The threat of repercussions from the thought police has certainly made people unwilling to to speak the truth (and that was the plan of course), for which it’s hard to blame them, but we’re never going to reach solutions until we can candidly point out the problem.

People are naturally unwilling to jeapardise their careers etc but they prove the truth of the matter everytime a white family participates in “white flight”. Even liberals prove it by living in white communities and sending their children to private schools, while condemning white working-class people to endure life under the very same liberal policies those liberals escape.

[mrsmel]

I was looking at historic crime statistics for Detroit-even before the civil rights era, the riots (and the ensuing white flight), liberal policies which destroyed the family, blacks committed crimes, including violent crimes (including black-on-white crimes) well beyond their proportion of the population.

[mrsmel]

And you would be correct, considering that majority-white liberal cities generally don’t have the same high crime rates (especially violent crimes), vandalism and decay/destruction etc which majority-black liberal cities have-but they will be catching up as their welfare policies attract more “vibrant diversity” and their crime rates rise (Portland Oregon being an example).

[x]

Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland? People were saying the same things about these cities 30 years ago. I’m not saying things aren’t bad, but they haven’t been good for a long time now.

[9YearLurker]

Cities like New York and Boston are thriving—fewer and fewer dodgy areas all the time.

Detroit, like some other cities but generally not our largest ones, is another story altogether.

[FreedomPoster]

That 12-14%, voting as a bloc, combined with a constant media brainwashing from the Liberal Assistant Media, make for a voting majority that is difficult to overcome. It will continue until it becomes so bad it is too difficult for the propaganda mills to prevail.

Obama may bring us to that point, strangely enough. People are starting to wake up to how extensively they’ve been lied to.

[x]

I know of no majority black city in the US that is NOT riddled with crime and decay. I know of no city in the US with a black population of under 5% that IS riddled with crime and decay.

An American city with an African-American population under 5% is what? A suburb? A big town? If you have a city of large enough size, all other things being equal it will have a large Black population and it will have big city problems.

The cities with the smallest Black populations are Provo UT and Brownsville TX. Both have had corruption problems in recent years, if the newspapers aren't lying. Lowell MA manages to have fewer than 5,000 Blacks (under 5% of the population). Still, it doesn't have a reputation as the nicest place to live (sorry, if anybody out there does live there).

[Windflier]

Which would you send your kids to - a public school in a city that was 95% black, or a public school in a city that was 5% black?

Interesting device, but instead of trying to corner me into making your point for you, why not just state it out loud yourself?

If you read my previous post on this, then you saw that I freely admit that there's a sickness of spirit in the black community. I also said that that sickness is mostly being manifested by a minority of those people. That is true, despite the fact that the general moral character of the black community (as a whole) has declined during my lifetime. The same can be said for the moral character of all racial sub groups in this country.

The point is, most people are basically good, and simply trying to get on with the business of living. That's true of any community.

As for my personal preferences, and so that you don't think I'm trying to dodge the question, my wife and I home school our kids, and have been doing so for over a decade. That said, if I were inclined to send them to government schools, I wouldn't willingly choose to enroll them in a predominantly black school, because the anti-social minority (which I spoke of earlier) exerts an influence over the majority of kids that far outweighs their actual numbers. This, I know from personal experience.

The same type of anti-social influence exists in predominantly white schools, too, but from what I've gathered, it's not nearly as dangerous.

Instruction, administration, and guidance in ALL of the public schools is equally bad. They ALL have a leftist mission to indoctrinate the children into their Communist world view, and the three Rs are only secondary considerations.