We have been following the political and economic demise of Detroit for years. Its leading officials from city council members to the former mayor to judges to lawyers in the city have been the source of endless scandals. They have coupled a shrinking economy with expanding levels of corruption and cronyism. Now, the city is planning to simply turn off half of the street lights to try to force citizens into a small living area — leaving much of the city abandoned and dark. We previously saw how the city’s fire chief suggested just let many buildings burn down to save the cost of firefighting.
Detroit covers 139 square miles but holds 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950. Some 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city does not have the money to fix them. The solution is to have citizens effectively fall back into a small enclave of living area — a perfect symbol of a city that is de-evolving back in time.
Other cities have decided to turn off some street lights, but not to this extent. This may be the best option in the short term, but Detroit has been in a free fall for decades. While other cities lost key industry, Detroit has long lacked competent leadership to try to lure people back into the city. The council did little to stop the gradual flight of both whites and affluent families to the suburbs. Politically, the city council and mayor were content with maintaining their political bases as the city’s economy fell and crime rose. Now the place looks like a sequel location to Escape from New York.
It is truly shocking and sad. Having grown up in Chicago, I remember Detroit when it was a thriving city. It was one of the world’s great cities. It is a wonderful location near the Canadian border and has some beautiful areas. I love the history surrounding the city. For that reason, I am very angry over its demise and frankly blame a long line of shockingly bad politicians. It is not that any politician could stop the economic slide due to the decline of the auto industry, but the Detroit leadership has lurched from one criminal investigation to another over the years. It now stands as a cautionary tale for all cities, particularly in losing their tax base and diversity in population. Many black and white families moved out of Detroit to avoid rising taxes and crime rate in what became a downward spiral for the city. That reduces jobs in the city and led to more people fleeing the city (in addition to the loss of auto jobs). With whole areas of the city now being abandoned, it is hard to see how the city can recover significantly in the near future. With much of the city being pushed into darkness and whole areas effectively a
A truly sad symbolic moment.
Source: MSN
When the Detroiters are all gone and live in suburbs or Florida, then the land should be given back to Native Americans. Of course Birthers will want papers from them.
Mayfly:
I think the Chrysler K car proves your point. What a POS that was, in fact most cars from that era sucked. The Gremlin, the Pinto, the “new” Ford Mustang [a supreme joke], the Chevy Nova, the list of lousy cars is endless from that era.
I find it interesting that the 70’s was a time of economic repression, Nixon’s wage and price freezes and the oil embargoes. Cars started getting better toward the middle of the decade of the 80’s. The first convertible Sebring was pretty good or at least on the right track.
Having lived in Detroit for a few years in the late ’70s and working as an executive in the automobile business during that time I feel somewhat qualified to speak on the subject of the American automobile downturn of that period. First, it wasn’t due to union pay scales. No one in the industry believed that seriously. Second, lethargy on the part of management was the principal cause of the decline of the industry: management refused to believe that the Japanese auto firms could take a significant percentage of the market and they refused to improve the quality of their offerings to match the Japanese product. No matter how much or how little union members would be paid, auto buyers were inexorably moving to the better designed Japanese cars. The value equation hugely favored Toyota et al.
indigo jones:
are you saying black neighborhoods were razed on purpose? If so, I disagree, many white neighborhoods had highways cut right through them. Many more whites were displaced as a result of the interstate highway system.
When The Music’s Over Turn Out The Lights
There are sister cities of Detroit that have experienced the phenomenon of large sections becoming Unmemorials, for instance, New Orleans has lost about 400,000 citizens due to catastrophe.
There is one Unmemorial that would turn the lights out in all our cites.
Outsourcing, white (and now black) flight, crime, corruption, post-industrialization, bad schools, bad planning, -basically a perfect storm of bad luck and bad decision making for decades all over the place. The most pressing problem is crime. Nobody with choices is going to live or stay or live in an area where there is a better than slight chance of break-ins, home invasions or shootings. Fix the crime first and other solutions start to become possible.
@bron
It is true that the highway system was begun in the 50’s, but it was the 60’s that saw a major expansion of the insterstate system into cities. “Beltway” systems were built on top of successful black neighborhoods across the country, contributing to the sense of disenfranchisement among blacks that lead to nationwide riots in the late 1960’s.
This story was repeated across the country:
“Bronzeville was an African-American neighborhood that historically was situated between what is now the Harambee neighborhood and the North Division neighborhood. Specifically, Bronzeville was bordered by State Street on the south, North Avenue on the north, 3rd street on the east and 12th street on the west.[6] Much of this former district was centered along Walnut Street (essentially halfway between State Street and North Avenue) until it was razed to make room for the Interstate 43 and other arterial road expansions. After that the community was displaced.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhoods_of_Milwaukee#Bronzeville
More to the point at hand:
“Black Bottom endured the Great Depression, with many of its residents working in factories. Following World War II, the physical structures of Black Bottom were in need of replacement. In the early 1960s, the City of Detroit demolished the Black Bottom district as part of an urban renewal project. The area was replaced by the Chrysler Freeway (Interstate 75) and Lafayette Park, a residential development designed by Mies van der Rohe and intended as a model neighborhood”
or this, in Oklahoma City:
“Like many urban interstates, I-81 demolished a black neighborhood. The interstate has created a tale of two cities: thriving Syracuse University on one side, struggling downtown on the other.”
Raff, its worse than that – those numbers were not correct even at the time the were smeared around.
The administration of St. Reagan got a package of tax breaks passed to promote moving jobs out of the US. During the 80’s they held a large conference, paid for by US tax payers, in Mexico to help large American companies move jobs to the third world. GM, Ford and Chrysler were in attendance and took the advice.
They won’t be happy until we have not worker protection, no environmental or safety rules and we are earning the same kind of money as the drones at Foxconn. The part they have not figured out yet is who is going to buy their shit when nobody has any money except our overlords.
Tony C:
I have no problem with an Interstate Highway System which was built for the defense of the American people. That is a legitimate function of government. That it has other benefits is just icing on the cake, an efficient use of tax dollars, like the buy one suit get 2 free sales at Jos. A Banks.
@Bron: People started leaving the cities for the suburbs in the late 40′s and early 50′s for cheap housing, the automobile made that possible.
Basically true, but the automobile was around for 40 years before that. What really made it happen was the combination of the automobile and the invention of the highway, and Eisenhower’s big collective project to build a national highway system, which he believed after seeing similar collective works in Europe, was a necessity for national defense to move troops and equipment, and incidentally a boon for industry (free roads meant faster and cheaper transportation of goods).
Both of those things turned out to be very true, and a side effect of the highways was “geographic shrinkage.” Many places that could only be reached by dirt (10-15 mph) and local roads (20-30 mph) were suddenly, time-wise, half as far away, or less.
Suburbs were just one result of Eisenhower’s collectivist creation of a national transportation system. All in all it has returned hundreds of times over the total investment in taxes for creation and maintenance, in saved time, saved money, increased market penetration and distribution, and greater mobility leading to greater economic opportunity.
Reasons for Detroit’s Decline
Published • Sun, May 13, 2012
COMMENTARY
By Ron Markoe
http://michigancitizen.com/reasons-for-detroits-decline-p11160-76.htm
When the great migration of blacks moved from the cotton fields of the south and moved up north to where there were plenty of job opportunities and good wages in Detroit, the whites started moving out. From that era on,Detroit was starting decline.
The solution is to have citizens effectively fall back into a small enclave of living area —
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oh look….concentration camps!
Indigo Jones:
I dont think it is like you say. People started leaving the cities for the suburbs in the late 40’s and early 50’s for cheap housing, the automobile made that possible. And builders like Levitt provided the cheap housing to GI’s returning from WWII.
From what I can tell, cities go through a process of decay and renewal. But renewal is not funded by old rich retired people, most of them are in Florida at the Villages. Typically urban renewal is brought about by young middle to above middle class professional people wanting to get closer to their work and finding good deals in parts of a city which have run down over time through neglect.
I used to do construction in St. Louis City, the west end area, rehabbing old town homes. This was back in the late 70’s. The people doing the rehabbing were young 30 somethings and they were selling to young 30 somethings. I now live in the DC area and the same thing happened here in the mid to late 80’s, the properties were mostly bought by young upwardly mobile professionals. They are now starting to move to the suburbs for various reasons, crime and tax rates being among them.
A city like Detroit is ripe for redevelopment. All they have to do is get rid of the corrupt city government and give business a reason to come back to the city. Some of those buildings are in such bad shape they will have to be imploded.
If I was young, I would be buying property in Detroit. By the time I was 50, I would be a wealthy man.
From my perspective, I see Detroit as a typical result of collectivism and corruption. I have friends who come from Africa and the stories they tell me sound hauntingly familiar to what has happened in Detroit. Corrupt government with a Marxist bent is what killed Detroit.
http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/index.html
On the flight to the suburbs…
This is an interesting example in the history of planned neglect. The suburbs we have today were ultimately made possible by ripping up economically successful black neighborhoods to make way for interstate expansion, connecting downtown areas to the suburbs directly. One consequence was that commuters no longer went *through* the city, but *over* it. The cities were gutted for the suburbs, which eventually contributed to riots across the country.
These policies have artificially created a situation that is fundamentally opposite to what naturally occurs in most parts of the world: the inner city is typically the most valuable real estate, while the suburbs are the slums. Some racist planning wrapped in a Jeffersonian mythology led us in this direction.
Over the next couple decades, large parts of many cities were essentially left to deteriorate. By the 1980’s a lot of this inner city real estate was essentially worthless, and wealthy developers snatched it up. They sat on it for a decade or so, profiting from the tax writeoffs their depreciated real estate afforded them.
Here’s the real kicker: so with all the money these developers made off the dot-com bubble, they “redeveloped” all this land they had been sitting on to build fancy, high-end downtown condos so that retiring baby boomers can leave their suburban dream homes and spend their golden years in walkable neighborhoods with all the “amenities” that a disneyfied urban environment has to offer.
http://www.google.com/search?&q=condos+baby+boomers
Then the suburbs — where the housing stock is relatively poor, property values are depreciated, and a high cost of commuting will keep the property values low — will become attractive to first-time home-buyers looking for a bargain: the relatively poor, propagandized, and minorities, looking for the disney version of the jeffersonian american dream. These people will be stuck with a list of repairs to these cheap, aging houses, and American cities will at last come to resemble most cities around the world in that the affluent live in the inner-city, and the poor and “unassimilated” live at the margins.
Notwithstanding puzzling’s claim, the unions did not destroy Detroit. His article uses data from 4 years ago that is no longer true. GM and Ford are doing well and hiring. Even Chrysler is much improved. Those companes are producing a better product using union workers. Politics and political greed are two of the big reasons Detroit is a much less desirable place to live.
Who Killed Detroit?