How Detroit, the Motor City, Turned Into a Ghost Town

The city that was once one of the wealthiest in America is a decrepit, often surreal landscape of urban decline. It was once one of the greatest cities in the world. The birthplace of the American car industry, it boasted factories that at one time produced cars shipped over the globe.

Its downtown was studded with architectural gems, and by the 1950s it boasted the highest median income and highest rate of home ownership of any major American city. Culturally it gave birth to Motown Records, named in homage to Detroit's status as "Motor City".

Decades of white flight, coupled with the collapse of its manufacturing base, especially in its world-famous auto industry, have brought the city to its knees.

Half a century ago it was still dubbed the "arsenal of democracy" and boasted almost two million citizens, making it the fourth-largest in America. Now that number has shrunk to 900,000.

Its once proud suburbsnow contain row after row of burnt-out houses. Empty factories and apartment buildings haunt the landscape, stripped bare by scavengers. Now almost a third of Detroit – covering a swath of land the size of San Francisco – has been abandoned.

Tall grasses, shrubs and urban farms have sprung up in what were once stalwart working-class suburbs. Even downtown, one ruined skyscraper sprouts a pair of trees growing from the rubble.

The city has a shocking jobless rate of 29%. The average house price in Detroit is only $7,500, with many homes available for only a few hundred dollars. Not that anyone is buying. At a recent auction of 9,000 confiscated city houses, only a fifth found buyers.

Detroit is now $300m in debt and is cutting many of its beleaguered services, such as transport and street lighting.

Never had I seen or known how bad Detroit was till last night watching all the YouTube video's and some other web sites that evidenced the horror that city is for the Americans who live there.

I'd estimate it to be worse than Hurricane Katrina because there is no Fema trying to get folks into better living conditions. The only economic stimulus was a welfare payment to help with heating bills, a line of folks 35,000 deep that only 10% gets assistance.

Taxes have to be lowered for all business and the rich who invest and create the Jobs, that is the only way to get the number of Jobs in diverse sectors to support as many Americans that want to work.

The politicians have to give up their lust for power over the private sector. Yes, the rich can get richer, but that is none of the Governments business, especially at the cost of losing more cities to this decline.

Immediate tax amnesty for the rest of this year, and a 9% flat tax, business or individual thereafter. Life is too precious.

Found a site with some good historic reference;

Forgotten Detroit
http://www.forgottendetroit.com/

Detroit is known for one of the most stunning collections of pre-depression architecture in the world. The past two decades have seen several of these treasures sit vacant, waiting for economic revival. On these pages you will find information about the past, present, and future situations of a few of these landmarks. It is my hope that this information helps you gain an appreciation for the importance of both the history and continued survival of these buildings.

- Statler ***
- Book-Cadillac ***
- Fort Shelby ***
- Lee Plaza
- Madison-Lenox ***
- Tuller ***

United Artists -
*** Madison -
National -
*** Adams -

- Metropolitan Bldg.
- Kales Bldg. ***
- Farwell Bldg.
- People’s Outfitting ***

Michigan Central -
G.A.R. -
Fisher Body 21 -
*** St. Cyrils -
*** Jefferson Baptist -

There are two ways to approach urban decay. The first is to ignore it, leaving burned out husks of rotting buildings. The other is for the city to foreclose on the large areas of desolation, demolish it, then put in foliage to uptake the soil contamination.

Eventually it can be redeveloped, and the larger the area, the more valuable the redevelopment. If done intelligently, and entire “zone” can be redeveloped, that is a “city within the city”, an enclave of prosperity from which other redevelopment can grow outward.

Eventually, the city develops a permanent redevelopment plan, so that in turn, parts of the city are repaired, rebuilt, and improved on a regular, long term schedule. This is already being done in some of the western cities.

E. Michael Jones:

The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing

By now, it should be obvious that the government-sponsored initiative to renew this country's large cities which began in the 1930s and continued largely unabated in the East and Midwest through the 1960s and beyond has been a profound and devastating failure. More homes were destroyed than were ever built; once-great metropolises like Detroit lay in ruins; once-thriving neighborhoods were overwhelmed with drugs and crime; buildings that were built to last centuries fell to the wrecking ball mere decades after they were built; an entire generation of young people, both those who came to the cities and those who were driven from the cities into the suburbs, have grown up rootless, in a Hobbesian state in which man's life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

The traditional explanation, the one which no one believes anymore, is that all this was done to eliminate "blight." A more recent explanation, only slightly less implausible, is that it all came about because of faulty design, as if a nation of 260 million people, one which had already produced the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, couldn't come up with anything more inspiring that the average strip mall. The real story, it turns out, is different from both previous explanations. What began as the World War II intelligence community's attempt to solve America's "nationalities problem" and provide workers for the nation's war industries degenerated by the early post-war period into full-blown ethnic cleansing.

E. Michael Jones has followed the advice of Christopher Wrenn. Looking around, he saw monuments, but monuments to the folly and malice of social engineering and a government that had declared war on large segments of its own people. In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to do with design or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the last gasp attempt of the WASP ruling class to take control of a country that was slipping out of its grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be driven out of their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to be "Americanized" according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and "integration," the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood got transformed into something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the actual communities of people they saw as a threat to their control.

The Slaughter of Cities proposes a new take on familiar territory, e.g., to give just one example, the civil rights movement. Does anyone, for example, really know why Martin Luther King abandoned his southern strategy and came to Chicago during the summer of 1966? Does anyone really know who brought him there? Does anyone know who told him which ethnic neighborhoods he would march through? Hint: it was a religious denomination usually associated with Philadelphia that had been at work trying to "integrate" Chicago's neighborhoods since 1951.

Jones concentrates on four cities - Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago - in a book whose conclusions will be shocking and controversial. The destruction of the ethnic neighborhoods that made up the human, residential heart of these cities was not an unfortunate by-product of a well-intentioned plan that somehow went awry; it was part of the plan itself.

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"Unions!"