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How Detroit, the Motor City, Turned Into a Ghost Town
Guardian News and Media Limited ^ | Sunday 1 November | Paul Harris

Posted on 10/31/2009 7:08:56 PM PDT by Son House

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To: Son House
The past two decades have seen several of these treasures sit vacant, waiting for economic revival.

It's been more than the past two decades. I'd say since the riots of 67 and the election of Coleman Young and subsequent Democrat mayors. Detroit never recovered from the riots and it kept deteriorating from then on. Urban "renewal" was a bad joke. The projects, welfare, gang culture, unwed teenaged mothers, crime and corruption. Coleman got rid of "STRESS", a DPD unit that targeted hard-core crime, so the criminals were allowed to thrive. (That's what got him elected. He said he'd get rid of STRESS and he did). Crime was rampant after that and Detroit just couldn't recover. All of the money moved to the 'burbs. No one wanted to live in a crime infested rat hole like Detroit. All of those hundreds of youtube videos of Detroit are all from different neighborhoods. It's a shame what happened to Detroit. It was once beautiful and vibrant. It had a huge population with neighborhoods that stretched for miles from the the middle of the city outward. Believe it or not, it used to be known as The Paris of the Midwest. The homes were beautiful and the streets were treelined. Every neighborhood had it's own shopping districts and churches and schools. Now it's nothing but miles and miles of slums.

41 posted on 10/31/2009 7:40:08 PM PDT by FrdmLvr ("The people will believe what the media tells them they believe." Orwell)
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To: Son House
Have you seen the "Motor City Burning" series by this guy:

www.youtube.com/user/waketheherd

I was around as a kid in those days; had a chance to read the Detroit Free Press at that time too.

42 posted on 10/31/2009 7:41:11 PM PDT by _Jim (Conspiracy theories are the tools of the weak-minded.)
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To: muir_redwoods
"Crappy cars built by crappy union workers, produced by crappy businessmen working with crappy union bosses is how Detroit died."

No no no.

Off to re-education camp with you unless you get with the program.

Reread the article. "White flight", Rich folk with all the money, etc etc - They're to blame...

Not all the years of super high crime, violent gangs, and stuff you mentioned.

43 posted on 10/31/2009 7:41:17 PM PDT by maine-iac7 ("He has the right to criticize who has the heart to help" LINCOLN)
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To: Son House; Ozone34

I notice that although the Communist Guardian writes a very long article about the fall of Detroit, they never mention any of the reasons, with the single exception of the phrase “white flight.”

One set of my grandparents lived in Detroit, and did very well there. Nice houses, beautiful city.

What destroyed it?

I think two things, in particular. One was, of course, the Auto Worker’s Union, which at first fought with the big three auto executives but then learned to cooperate with them in producing bigger and clunkier cars for higher and higher wages and benefits, that were increasingly poorly put together. First they were threatened by Volkswagen, and then when that started to go downhill, the Japanese moved in, and gradually developed non-union plants in the USA. Why buy a lousy union-made car when you could get a well-made Japanese car for about half the price? Fewer maintenance bills, better mileage, and better handling.

The second factor was the blacks. FDR started it by moving large numbers of blacks up from the south during the Second World War. They stayed there, and gradually took over the auto and other unions as white workers retired.

Then the Democrats developed a plan. They brought blacks into all the inner cities in the name of racial justice, killed the old Catholic ethnic neighborhoods, and deliberately turned the cities into permanent welfare dumps that could be relied on to vote Democrat. The ethnics—Italian, Irish, Polish, etc.—moved out to the suburbs, and the cities were basically hollowed out and destroyed. Blacks might have moved into the cities in the normal course of events, and it would have been OK, but they were poured in in overwhelming numbers, and deliberately kept on welfare, preferably with single mothers and broken families. LBJ deserves a lot of the credit for that.

As Ozone34 points out, E. Michael Jones has written about that. Several books, in fact. I broke with him over what I considered to be his growing antisemitism; but his books are still very much worth reading, if you take them with a certain amount of caution. No question that the destruction of the old inner city neighborhoods was a deliberate Democrat plot to accumulate power and turn things the way they wanted.

Of course the Guardian can’t admit any of that. So they really can’t account for what happened.


44 posted on 10/31/2009 7:42:44 PM PDT by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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To: Son House
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.


45 posted on 10/31/2009 7:43:10 PM PDT by martin_fierro (< |:)~)
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To: Son House
How Detroit, the Motor City, Turned Into a Ghost Town

Bush's fault.

46 posted on 10/31/2009 7:43:20 PM PDT by Jim Noble (We Are Traveling in the Footsteps of Those Who've Come Before)
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To: elkfersupper
Detroit was destroyed on purpose. Now this nation is the target with Detroit as the model.

Yep. And it's up to us to stop it, by any means necessary.

47 posted on 10/31/2009 7:43:29 PM PDT by Lurker (The avalanche has begun. The pebbles no longer have a vote.)
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To: Soothesayer9
Surely there must be a better position to take than simply “pro-corporate” or “anti-corporate”. It is interesting reading some of those comments blame GM for outsourcing the jobs to asia/mexico. Fact is, employees there will work for pennies. We won’t.

Had the unions not practiced extortion over the past 40 years, outsourcing wouldn't have happened.

48 posted on 10/31/2009 7:44:38 PM PDT by buccaneer81 (ECOMCON)
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To: BobL

the Republicans to get in front of the issue and continue to show clips and pictures of what Detroit looks like and ask America if that’s what they REALLY want

^
Brilliant, it works in so many ways to, like that ‘Jobless recovery’ Democrats are trying to sell on the heals of their Stimulus bill


49 posted on 10/31/2009 7:45:04 PM PDT by Son House (2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Hear and See Democrats put the CON in CONgress)
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To: Son House

The city took a sharp turn for the worse under the hip hop Mayor and his family. Dave Bing and Robert Bobb are doing what they can to restore dignity to both the city and the school system which is ripe with corruption. If they do not succeed then it will fall in the next ten years.

Bing is challenging the Unions and Bobb is challenging the School Board.

Living in the suburbs I hope they are successful but I am not holding my breath.


50 posted on 10/31/2009 7:45:46 PM PDT by kempster
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To: Son House

Democrats, unions, black power activists.


51 posted on 10/31/2009 7:47:18 PM PDT by gorilla_warrior (Metrosexual hairless RINOs for hopey-changey bipartisan-ness)
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To: Son House
screamkill

We know why it happened.

52 posted on 10/31/2009 7:47:46 PM PDT by Nateman (If liberals aren't screaming you're doing it wrong.)
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To: Son House

Hmmm, is detroit the first to go, and is it the plan of the chicago administration in DC to this to the rest of the nation? Hmmm.


53 posted on 10/31/2009 7:48:01 PM PDT by huldah1776 ( Worthy is the Lamb)
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To: Lurker
Yep. And it's up to us to stop it, by any means necessary

Seven Days In May.

54 posted on 10/31/2009 7:48:46 PM PDT by buccaneer81 (ECOMCON)
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To: Soothesayer9

Yep, tax policy too. Other countries are cluing in on how to attract companies as Democrats repel all our businesses with their tax and spend policies.


55 posted on 10/31/2009 7:48:48 PM PDT by Son House (2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Hear and See Democrats put the CON in CONgress)
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To: Son House

one word answer.

UNIONS


56 posted on 10/31/2009 7:50:01 PM PDT by TexasFreeper2009 (Obama lied, the economy died)
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To: Ozone34
shhhh - inconvenient truth shall no longer be spoken in this totalitariat...
57 posted on 10/31/2009 7:54:12 PM PDT by maine-iac7 ("He has the right to criticize who has the heart to help" LINCOLN)
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To: festusbanjo

Yep, and the first time many of those folks are met with real kindness and friendship will be when they leave their leaders


58 posted on 10/31/2009 7:54:40 PM PDT by Son House (2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Hear and See Democrats put the CON in CONgress)
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To: Baynative

Detroit is the product of what it’s citizens have voted for. What’s the problem ... aren’t they getting what they want?

Exactly.

The worst part of it is that this is what our great country will become unless we get Obummer, the Marxist now posing as a Fascist, out of the White (red) House.

We must start by repeating in 2010 in every congressional district the same thing that is happening in NY23


59 posted on 10/31/2009 7:56:10 PM PDT by old curmudgeon
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To: Ozone34
One of the reviewers has a different (and intriguing) conclusion:
E. Michael Jones, long known as an extremely conservative Catholic commentator on a variety of cultural issue from the motives of modern philosophers to music and architecture, turns in "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing" to the destruction of American cities by urban planners during the twentieth century.

Jones argues throughout "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing" that the purpose of the "urban renewal" plans of twentieth-century America was to discriminate against the migrant, originally non-English speaking Roman Catholic working class populations of the inner cities of Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Boston. He argues that this was done through co-operation between a black underclass of migrants from the South and a white, classically Protestant ruling class that viewed the high Catholic birthrate as a threat to its dominance in the long term. Jones thinks that the plans of these two groups combined to remove the separation between these Catholic communities and a hostile outside world, with the result that Catholic culture lost its distinctive character and it became much tougher to maintain adherence to official Church teachings as they moved into the suburbs.

Because, today, suburbs (and even more exurbs) are as Phillip Longman has said the most conservative sections of global society today - the ones where living a life in accordance with the strict regime of the Vatican are easiest owing to their low living costs allowing affordable families - it is impossible for me to see Jones' criticism of suburbs as well-argued. This is especially true when one sees that today people without motor-cars have far fewer children than those most reliant upon them. They are also far more amenable to stable marriages than European or East Asian cities. He does not explain how population growth among Catholic migrant groups would have been accommodated in any other manner in the post-Depression period: there is obviously only a finite amount of space in old "cities". Even the fabled "baby boom" and growth of faith and family in the very period urban renewal occurred is now known to be a phenomenon of suburban Catholics - with the emphasis on suburban


60 posted on 10/31/2009 7:57:33 PM PDT by Zhang Fei (Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always)
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