My brothers run a property service company that maintains foreclosed homes in Detroit and parts northwest of it. When they need extra help, I ride along with them.
Detroit and Pontiac are not the kinds of places that one would care to go by oneself, even for muscular young men. On more than one occasion, we would be approached by "youths" (one of them wasn't even that young) who were clearly drug dealers. One of my brothers confirmed this to me. The smell of marijuana smoke was another tell. Once, we were leaving a property just as several police cars were converging on a group of huddled young men. Those young men had been giving us the evil eye and my brother hurried us out of there.
In some houses, the mold grew as tufts of fur spackling the walls in patches bigger than a man's hand. Garbage, broken furniture, and other debris was piled higher than our waists in some houses; the previous tenants had been mentally ill hoarders. We hiked through those rooms more than we walked into them.
Last winter, we found a house where ice covered the basement up to a foot below the roof. I stepped on the ice on the stairs going down and my foot cracked through. I missed a cold and putrid bath by catching the walls just in time.
When they first went into that business, my brothers were assured that -- sooner or later -- they would come upon a drug house or a dead body.
I live in the suburbs. I do not want to live in Detroit.
I've lived in the Metro Detroit suburbs, and downtown Detroit is the spot right now. The ability to get whatever you need, yes even groceries, within walking distance is a reality. Walking to Tigers games, enjoying the nightlife, eating at amazing restaurants, and enjoying the city are a regular part of life.
I live in downtown Detroit. I do not want to live in the suburbs.
"The ability to get whatever you need, yes even groceries, within walking distance is a reality."
No offence, but having lived in about 4 major US cities (Detroit not included), that seems to be setting the bar awfully low. Being able to buy groceries is just a basic necessity, and restaurants/nightlife is something every city has.
He/she is coming from the Detroit suburbs though. Everything there is spread out and you really need a car to get anywhere. I used to drive ~20 minutes to get to the movie theater that I frequented. Granted, I lived within walking distance of a grocery store even in the suburbs, but that just happened to be the case.
Yeah, but surely even people from the suburbs realize that that sort of thing is expected in nearly every city... after all, the city isn't the suburbs.
Wikipedia says St Louis had 353k inhabitants; how can a city of that size not have grocery store? Not all of them could be eating out every single meal? Or is this for some specific definition of 'grocery store'?
The parent comment is referring to downtown in particular - of course the city has grocery stores, but many cities have few or no grocery options in the central business district, as suburbia sucked the life from downtown in the 80's and 90's.
A lot of people aren't very conscious about this kind of a decision and are used to a lifestyle of driving multiple miles before getting to a grocery store.
I must admit I don't know what it is like to live like that. Maybe if you only go shopping once a week (or even just every two weeks), it is not too bad.
I actually live about 1/2 mile from a great grocery store but regularly (~once per week) drive 2.5 miles to the greatest grocery store. It's not so bad. It's even easier to go that far or farther for people in the suburbs with fast roads or highways that go to their neighborhood-ish grocery store, rather than my town of Berkeley which has weird traffic calming patterns to try to actively discourage me from driving to the Berkeley Bowl West.
It is still sort of surreal that right next to the Tiger's stadium there are a bunch of condos, but right next to the condos are a bunch of overgrown/condemned buildings. Also, I've been at the waterfront for the freedom fireworks (combined July 1 and July 4 fireworks display) on the Windsor side of the river and it was a pleasant experience. I'd never consider doing the same on the Detroit side of the river.
Though I should note that I haven't lived in the area since 2005, but most of my family still lives there.
Edit: Here's what I'm talking about. There are rows of condos right by the intersection of I-75 and Woodward Ave, but to the north there are some empty fields with abandoned houses. At one point those lots (which are now empty) were lined with houses.
And if you stay in the Green Zone, then Baghdad isn't all that bad, either. If you stick to the embassies, Addis Ababa is actually rather safe. Stay away from the favelas and Rio de Janeiro is a lovely place.
Since you tend to go there only when dealing with foreclosed homes, perhaps you aren't seeing some of the nicer places? I have plenty of friends who live in Detroit and love it. I used to live there myself and loved it. Yes, there is ruin porn a-plenty, and many nasty areas. But there are also neighborhoods where you can live for really cheap and be part of a great, caring community.
Of course, I'm sure my thoughts on the matter in no way reflect the majority's opinion. I've lived in Toronto for 4 years now, and not a day goes by without me pining to go back to Detroit.
Dibble's First Law of Sociology: Some do; some don't.
Accentuating the positive is cold comfort. Tenth-century Rome hosted the development of Gregorian chant and papal charters for the first universities. Focusing on those positive developments doesn't change the fact that Rome was a step or two above a cow town compared to contemporary Constantinople or, better yet, first-century Rome.
Of course Detroit has nice places and nice people. I saw examples of that and my brothers have seen more. The reason why so many people focus on the ruin porn is that Detroit has so much more of it than most cities of its size. Speaking of size, Detroit has lost more than half of its population in forty years. Satellite photos reveal that the city is steadily returning to wilderness. This happened to the premier heavy industrial city of what was supposed to be the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth. This is a flipping travesty!
Similar decline happened to other American cities at the same time. Philadelphia. Saint Louis. Newark. The South Side of Chicago. Parts of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It nearly happened to the entirety of New York. Let's face it, these cities were more livable when they were run by ethnic machine politics staffed by people who squeaked through third-tier parochial colleges.
What makes this ruin porn all the more infuriating -- and disturbing -- is that it started when the cool people with the right ideas from the Ivy League schools stepped in. This is what makes us really uncomfortable. We know that it's "incorrect" to say it. The urban renewal and racial integration policies that were ostensibly supposed to improve these cities have utterly and ignominiously failed.
Urban renewal and racial integration are to blame, and not the destruction of the entire regional economy? Or, not to put to fine a point on it, did black people kill the auto industry too?
I grew up on the south side of Chicago, by the way, and I don't know what you're talking about, unless your suggestion is that any metropolis that has bad neighborhoods is evidence of the failure of racial integration.
"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 largely Catholic ethnics" (I'm a Catholic of Irish and Eastern European descent) were not "driven out" of their neighborhoods. They left them as a reaction to integration and the beginning of the end of redlining policies. The "control" they lost was "the ability not to live next to ethnic minorities other than their own".
Moreover, upon leaving the white Irish Catholic and Polish enclaves, mortgage lending moved with them, leaving the neighborhoods to be filled with residents who were systematically denied ownership of their own homes. The attending decline in property values and upkeep were entirely predictable.
Again: we have a situation clearly explainable through economics, and you seem intent on injecting race into it. Why?
Drive a few hours south from the (gradually but painfully resurging) south side of Chicago to southern Illinois and you'll find predominantly white towns that have been similarly devastated by the rural economy and the decline of small-scale midwestern manufacturing jobs, and methamphetamine.
Also: you're not a little concerned that the "book that changed your way of thinking" about urban decay was written by a guy that has a whole section on the ADL's website, who has written of a "Jewish takeover of American culture"?
I know nothing of the book that is being mentioned here, but various policies in the mid-20th century DID force the breakup of the traditional ethnic neighborhoods.
It's not an issue as simple as black and white. I live in an area that in the 1960's had thriving Irish, Italian and Polish catholic communities. Community being the key word -- these folks lived, worshipped and attended school together. They were tight groups of people, who still maintain ties today.
The reality of this is a loss of community in general -- read the book "Bowling Alone", which describes the decline of civic life in America, and isn't written by a kook. My children are almost certainly not going to know the names of more than half of the people who live in our city block with about 40 homes. In my childhood (back in the 70's and 80's), we knew everyone.
My kids play with 5 other families on my block, and we know many, many more of our neighbors than that. I'm literally a stone's throw from one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago. Here's a suggestion: instead of blaming your alienation from your block on the breakup of old racist† '60s ethnic enclaves, reach out to the people on your block. They'll appreciate it. Set up a block party. Collect email addresses from your neighbors and start a mailing list. Do a neighborhood watch. Talk to the other parents on the block and set up a movie night.
I'm glad that you're so progressive, but you happen to be the exception. You also are reading what you want to, and not what I said.
The nationwide trend is that social interaction between Americans has been in decline substantially in recent years. This is pretty much across the board. Again, read Bowling Alone, or skim a review of it. These are quantifiable facts.
You can apply whatever judgement that you want, but the fact is that ethnic communities were and in some cases still are true communities that people feel a part of. Your suggestions are also great ways to build a community based on commonalities other than language and culture.
The review I remember reading of Bowling Alone contrasted its example of declining urban bowling leagues with the surge in urban soccer leagues.
Commentators since de Toqueville have observed that Americans are remarkably strong at forming leagues and clubs around their interests. Some go away and are replaced by others. Isolating half of this process ("some go away") as some kind of indication of social rot is purely in the eye of the beholder.
Yes, they were driven out. There was a sharp increase in crime caused by the friction of disparate groups suddenly coming in close contact with each other (Devil's Night and so forth). Yugoslavia broke up due to such friction, and those ethnic groups have been in contact with each other for centuries. The Malays and Chinese of Malaysia have had plenty of scuffles, too, and they've been around each other for a long time, as well. Those are just two examples. Diversity + Proximity = War. A fortiori, integration in Detroit was going to be eventful.
Furthermore, a lot of people throughout the world like to live next to those who are like themselves. I mean, a lot. When I was younger, I was shocked by the attitudes of older members of my family towards out-groups. I'm a little older, now, and see that it's not going away. We need to build around this fact of human nature, because we can't plow it through.
If the remaining residents of Detroit were being "systematically denied ownership of their own homes" then some bank could make a killing giving them home loans. During the housing bubble, we saw what happened when banks did that. My brothers make a living picking up the pieces.
I'm not injecting race into anything because race was a part of this to begin with. Noam Chomsky, in his book Understanding Power, noted this: "Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic."
The blank slate hypothesis of human nature has a lot of evidence going against it. If natural selection is true, then different populations of any species must have different distributions of alleles. Otherwise, there's nothing for natural selection to select. Cochran & Harpending cover this: http://the10000yearexplosion.com/
As for E. Michael Jones, he didn't start going into his theory of the Jews until after he wrote his other work.
> As for E. Michael Jones, he didn't start going into his theory of the Jews until after he wrote his other work.
Yeah, and I'm more than a little creeped-out calling anything this guy produces a "theory" or even "work".
Since you keep bringing up this guy's theories as such a transformative event for you and all, just for edification, here's what the Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about his "theory of the Jews":
"The magazine's cover stories over the last year or so are instructive: "Judaizing: Then and Now," "John Huss and the Jews," "The Converso Problem: Then and Now," "The Judaism of Hitler," "Shylock Comes to Notre Dame" and so on. Jones runs through all the usual anti-Semitic canards -- the ideas that "Jewish media elites" run the country, that Jews are "major players" in pornography, and that Jews are behind Masonry and the French Revolution -- but that's only the start. He also accuses Jews of poisoning society with thinkers such as Karl Marx (a devotee of Satan, says Jones) and Sigmund Freud (who set off an epidemic of sexual sin, he says). And he describes the World War II Nazi genocide of the Jews as "a reaction to Jewish Messianism (in the form of Bolshevism)." Last April, in an article raging about a new president of Notre Dame University, Jones charged that anyone who went to a mainstream university would emerge "with a Jewish world view … and maybe a Jewish spouse." Jones, who has written nine books and hundreds of articles, regularly cites extremist sources, especially the American Free Press run by veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto. He also has taken up race, most obviously in his "Rooted Culture" conferences that include a trip to Germany. The 2005 trip theme would be familiar to any neo-Nazi -- "the continuing deracination in Germany." Jones has one other line of business that would be familiar to the racist right: the "neo-ethnic songs" he sells as part of a bid to create what he calls a true "Volk" music."
Sounds to me like his "theory of the Jews" stupidity didn't exactly evolve too far from his "theory of the blacks", eh?
> Diversity + Proximity = War
And now...let's see here now...such an elegant little equation for Hacker News here and all...concise...and war...sounds harsh...so, according to the 2000 census, the following U.S. cities were more diverse than Detroit: Long Beach, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Sacramento, San Jose, Chicago, Dallas, Anaheim, Newark, San Francisco, Miami, Riverside, San Diego, Fort Worth, Boston, Honolulu, Santa Ana, Milwaukee, Denver, Austin, Tampa, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Tucson, Corpus Christi, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Cleveland, Buffalo, Arlington, Norfolk, Charlotte, Washington, Minneapolis, Kansas City, St. Paul, Omaha.
So they should all be war zones - that's what your equation tells us, eh? Yugoslavia. Bosnia. Ethnic cleansing in all those cities much more diverse than Detroit. Isn't that the phrase in the title of E. Michael Jones little racist book you keep leaving off for some reason: "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing"?
As I wrote in the previous post, Jones wrote that book before he started writing about Jews. Since you refuse to draw the implied inference, then I will do it for you: I disagree with E. Michael Jones about the Jews; I think that E. Michael Jones is wrong about the Jews. Think before you post. If I agreed with Jones about the Jews, then why would I bother pointing out what time he wrote which opinion?
Since that's settled (I hope), you should try to refute the claims of Jones with which I agree rather than those with which I disagree. But you don't even try. You go for point & sputter. Why don't you pull a Godwin while you're at it?
Furthermore, the fact that I agree with some of a persons opinions does not imply agreement with all of that persons opinions. Pick any of your heroes; almost certainly they will hold at least one opinion which you find repellant. I won't hold that against you. One would think that that would go without saying around here. More the fool I.
As for Diversity + Proximity = War, that is rough description. In order for different groups to be in conflict with each other, they must be within striking distance of each other.
New York City has had friction between not only races, but ethnic groups for a long time. Have you heard of the movie Gangs of New York? It was based on a non-fiction book written in 1928.
I'll keep this post as short as I can and invite you to fire up your favorite search engine and enter "racial tension X" without quotes, substituting one of the cities in your list for X. It does not make for pleasant reading.
"What makes this ruin porn all the more infuriating -- and disturbing -- is that it started when the cool people with the right ideas from the Ivy League schools stepped in."
Post hoc, ergo proper hoc? I don't necessarily disagree with you, but don't you think that there might be more contributing factors? In particular, the decline of the American auto industry comes to mind in regards to Detroit.
Obviously the decline of the auto industry was a major factor in Detroit's fall but the civil unrest of the late 60s is what caused the "white flight" out of Detroit and into the suburbs. The city has remained unstable since for a slew of reasons, the biggest one likely being corrupt government.
There's just very little incentive to live in the city itself anymore between the lack of small businesses, crime, etc. I heard a story of a guy who purchased an entire block of houses, demolished them, built new condos and was waiting on city inspection so people could start moving in. Inspection took a while and in the meantime the newly-built condos were broken into and stripped of any valuable piping/wiring. Does that really a place you want to live in? The only reasons I go into the city are for sporting events, the occasional concert, or urbex.
The segregation of Detroit and its metropolitan area are SHOCKING. Look at this map: http://bit.ly/ptgVNe
The blue is African-Americans. The red is Caucasians. The all-too-clear division begins at 8 mile.
Some sort of link has to be established in order to unify the suburbs and the city. Hopefully the M1 rail project can be that link -- unfortunately, like I said in another comment, the rail has to stretch further into the suburbs for it to have any chance of success, IMO.
The American automobile industry didn't really get hit by imports until the Oil Shocks of the 1970s. By then, the productive population of Detroit was already fleeing to the suburbs. Also, if the decline of the American automobile industry explains the decline of Detroit, then the suburbs of Detroit would have declined as well, instead of expanding. Furthermore, the decline of the American automobile industry does not explain why similar declines occurred in the other cities which I mentioned.
The suburbs of Detroit are also in decline. For how many years now has Michigan been in the bottom quartile for unemployment?
The fact that Twelve Oaks Mall is nice and has an Apple Store doesn't mean that that the Detroit Suburbs are proof of a functioning greater Detroit metro economy.
"Decline" means different things when applied to Detroit and to its suburbs. The suburbs are much safer and have much better infrastructure, among many other things.
Higher up in this thread, I referenced the book The Slaughter of Cities, by E. Michael Jones. That is the book around which my views have gelled.
New York and Newark are nothing like Detroit right now. Both are going through a great revival. There are a lot of reasons why, but it really has nothing to do with machine politics, ivy league educated people, or anything else you mentioned.
In my opinion, most of the credit goes to better policing, everything else follows the drop in crime.
I very nearly agree with you, but I'd argue that policing has little to do with it as well.
Detroit's crime rate has plummeted since the 1970s along with the rest of the US, despite no widely-celebrated crackdown. [1] Indeed crime rates have continued their drop from even the early 2000s despite a police department that was rapidly shrinking and increasingly mired in corruption/abuse investigations over that same time frame.
What's holding Detroit back, imo, are uncompetitive services caused by too few funds to cover too much sprawl. Even as the downtown enjoys a modest revival, the neighborhoods are non-options for anyone who wants to own a home. Particularly when functional suburbs with lower taxes and great schools are less than thirty minutes down the highway.
The city needs consolidation.
[1] The only anti-crime campaign I can even recall, was the mid-90s community effort to combat Devil's Night.
Very interesting perspective, I'll admit I know little about Detroit although I have been there twice in the last 2 years for a few days on business so I have seen the city in its current state.
As a counter point, I left Detroit in 2005 and I've lived in Toronto and Portland. Not a day goes by that I wish I were still living in Detroit or its suburbs.
Metro Detroit has a lack of good public transit. Everything is spread out, making biking annoying to impossible. I don't even think that the drivers would know what to do if they saw a bike on the road other than: 1) attempt to run down the rider or 2) swerve wildly into other lanes of traffic.
Their prediction sounds accurate to me. A few years ago my friends and I checked out the old DPS Book Depository. After walking around, we decided against going inside. Later that winter a frozen body turned up in the elevator shaft.
While there might be hope in some new downtown lofts with development spreading outward, the neighborhoods surrounding Detroit are just plain scary, even to drive through.
There is a great site called http://www.detroitblog.org that goes through many of these buildings and, more recently, features the people that live in these areas.
If you are more interested in the building porn I'd go back several years. The human interest stories are also mostly great and are more recent.
At the end of World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. They were rebuilt into gleaming cities because they were inhabited by the Japanese.
Today it's Detroit that looks like it was nuked. Except it was the inhabitants that nuked themselves, with quaint festivals like Devil's Night.
No one has the courage to say what ruined Detroit, or Rhodesia, or South Africa. You have to pretend like it just happened. People get far more angry at those who state why it happened than they do at the drug dealers and criminals who've ruined the city.
Were Rhodesia and South Africa ruined by a sudden and deliberate demographic shift that decimated the region's tax base and created dysfunction in the regions politics, followed by three decades of setbacks for core economic engine for the region mixed with offshoring?
Because I thought that's what did Detroit in. Not drug dealers. We have those in Chicago too, but also Boeing and stuff.
The "sudden and deliberate demographic shift", also known as white flight, may indeed have happened because whites were and are irrationally racist. This is certainly the conventional wisdom. And by the end, there was surely no dearth of white racists, especially among the Polish community after the confrontation with Coleman Young.
But is it legitimate for people to state that there may be other factors as well, in addition to pure white racism? Or should they be verbally assaulted and shunned for expressing the view that history is complex?
EDIT: For example, incidents like this may have played a role in promoting white flight.
No, it's not illegitimate to state that. Racism was a small factor. There was virulent racism in Chicago as well. The big reason is economics.
The viewpoint that will (rightly) get you shunned is the one that says "black people" were a factor (or, worse, "an international Jewish conspiracy to take over American culture").
"The viewpoint that will (rightly) get you shunned is the one that says "black people" were a factor"
Do you shun that viewpoint because it is false and slanderous? Or do you believe that it is true, but that it must not be talked about, because the wrong people might exploit the history for undesirable ends?
It seems to me stunning that anyone can dispute the statement that "black people played a role in the decay of Detroit". It's every bit as true as saying, "White people played a role in the 1906 Atlanta riots" or "Mongols played a role in the sacking of Baghdad in 1258" or "Irish played a major role in the degeneracy of New York's five points in the 1850's". Obviously, this is not to say that all central-asians are responsible for sacking Baghdad or that all blacks are responsible for the destruction of Detroit. But it is true that both of the events had an ethnic component to them, and if you want to understand what happened, you need to understand how different groups of people played a part.
I've spent quite a bit of time over the years trying to piece together what happened to leave so many American areas in ruins. Detroit is the worst, but large swaths of cities like Saint Louis, Baltimore, New Haven, NY, Cleveland, Buffalo, Philadelphia, etc, show the same patterns of blight, abandonment, decay, crime, drug abuse, and gang violence.
The quickest summary I can produce is:
a) The U.S. has always had a crime problem. A good deal of this crime problem has stemmed from the fact that the police and justice system have always been much less effective at bringing criminals to justice than have the European systems. This was the case in the early 1900's and it's still the case today. Read this book if you want more details: http://books.google.com/books?id=NGBLAAAAMAAJ&dq=raymond...
b) In the U.S. in the early 1900's, the south had the most ineffective policing system. Judges were horribly corrupt and murderers could often buy a non-guilty plea for as low as $50. And in the south, the black communities had the least justice. Police and the courts did not care when black people killed black people. Not suprisingly, crime was a huge problem among the black population. If you look at murder rates by city in the 1910's, its always the cities with large black populations that had the highest rates, and if you look at crime by race, you see the same effect.
c) During the 1910's through the 1960's, black people migrated north in large numbers. The migration was due to push factors (escaping Jim Crow, loss of jobs due to mechanization in the cotton fields) and pull factors (the two world wars creating lots of manufacturing jobs).
d) American law enforcement was always lax, but in the 1950's and 1960's it became even more so. A series of court rulings made it more difficult to arrest and convict. Liberal leaning mayors and progressive activists helped curb the age-old practice of police dealing "street justice". During that time period, the average expected punishment for a given act of burglary declined by 75%.
e) The civil rights movement quickly branched out into the "black power" movement. Parts of the black power movement blamed whites in general for all the ills of the world, and gave justifications for violence. Young men always have supressed desire to riot and rampage, to exert their own sense of power and dominance. Many black young men latched on to the ideas of the black power movement as a rationalization for violence against all whites (even those who had zero responsibility for slavery or discrimination).
f) As part of urban renewal push, city planners razed entire blocks and neighborhoods. The government erected housing projects, populated largely by blacks, in replacement. Most of the housing projects had little or no police or security precense. Complex bureaucratic rules made it impossible to evict misbehaving neighbors. Without any government law and order, gang rule took over and anarchy ensued.
g) So altogether, you have a population that historically has had quite high crime rates moving in to Detroit. The policing at the time is becoming much more lax. The housing projects knock down existing blocks and place these new, high crime residents right in the middle of more middle class residents. These high crime residents often bear a special grudge towards white people. As a result, these middle class residents are exposed to a level of violence and social degeneracy that is schocking. Muggings and assults become a frequent occurrence. Naturally, they flee.
h) The biggest tipping point was the 1967 riots, during which (almost entirely black) mobs torched buildings, looted stores, and killed residents. They killed people like Sheren George "a married mother of two. Shot while in the car driven by her husband (Ross), as they tried flee from a mob of black youths beating a white man." and Krikor Messerlian, "A 68 year-old Armenian immigrant, beaten to death by a group of black youths, one wielding a baseball bat." The police stood back most of the first day of the riots, but by the third day the military was called in and started using live rounds. They killed a bunch of rioters and some innocent people. After the riots, the rate of exodus from Detroit rose from 20,000 a year to 80,000 a year.
(comment got too long for HN to handle, breaking into a second comment)
> It seems to me stunning that anyone can dispute the statement that "black people played a role in the decay of Detroit".
That statement, as it stands, is ambiguous, and that its implications depend a lot on what it's taken to mean.
Statement 1: Many of the people involved in the decay of Detroit were black.
Statement 2: Many of the people involved in the decay of Detroit were black, and their blackness was an important factor in the decay.
Statement 3: Many of the people involved in the decay of Detroit were black, and their blackness was an important factor in the decay because of some actual difference between black people and white people.
Statement 4: Many of the people involved in the decay of Detroit were black, and their blackness was an important factor in the decay because black people are stupider or nastier or crazier than white people.
Statement 1 is clearly true. Statement 2 is not clearly true. Statement 3 is very likely false. Statement 4 is almost certainly false. (These are of course all my own opinions; I am not claiming that they are self-evident.)
Statement 4, if true, might well have implications like "We should try to get rid of the black people" or "We should make it easy for white people to keep black people away from them" or "Black and white people should be segregated". Statement 1, on its own, would not.
There are plenty of people around who would endorse something like statement 4, and who would be happy to draw such conclusions. It is widely considered (and I agree) that these are not very nice people, and that the policies they prefer would be socially harmful, and that many of the things they believe about black people are factually wrong, and that if their ideas were more widely believed it would be a very bad thing.
That is why expressing views like statement 4 may "get you shunned". For the same reason, if what you intend is (say) only statement 1 then it seems to me that you ought to make that clear.
(I must say that I don't see why anyone would find statement 1 interesting, unless they think that what's really true is one of those later statements. And if someone finds such statements worth making, I am going to suspect that they may have in mind some conclusions of the sort I mentioned above. I suspect I'm not alone in this.)
People misunderstand the issue at hand in these conversations a lot so I figured I'd chime in a bit. Is there a difference between blacks and whites? Yes and no, it's complicated. The real differences at hand, as I think some commenters below pointed out is the difference between affluent and those that are less so. These are cultural differences and tend to manifest themselves as racial differences because of the disparate wealth numbers for the different demographics (25% of Blacks are in poverty and the median income amongst blacks is about 16k less than that of the national average).
It would be more correct to refer to this group as a sort of sub-culture, the group includes people of other ethnicities also. Sadly, this doesn't answer the original question. We have a subculture in America, one made up of primarily African Americans, that the glamorizes drugs, violence, and a victim mentality; While simultaneously villainizing education and success. Is this a trait of "blacks"? No, absolutely not. It is however the traits of the culture many blacks have aligned themselves with.
Thank you. You expressed that more clearly than I could have expressed it. Unfortunately, even starting to go down this path can cause misunderstanding.
Your thorough breakdown of that part of the issue -- as good as it is -- is still only a part of the problem. Wrapping our heads around the whole thing would require making as thorough a breakdown as yours on all of the other factors, as well.
In the context of America, black is an ethnicity as well as a race. Maybe we should have two different words to distinguish the two, but we don't, and that's the way the word is used. A racial-ethnic group is a group up people who share characteristics of lineage, culture, dialect, mores, norms, etc. Obviously, all talk of ethnic characteristics will be unfortunately general. Not every Italian likes espresso, not every American-urban-black person likes fried chicken, etc.
I think it is a very well supported statement to say that the "american-black-ethnic-group" that moved north into Detroit had levels of crime that the prior residents of Detroit found quite disturbing. And a major proportion of this crime was directed at white people in a racially charged manner. That is not to say that violence is an indelible attribute of all black ethnic groups, at all times, and all places. But high rates of violence was a property of this particular ethnic group, at this time, at this place. The movement of this ethnic group into the city, and the interactions of this ethnic group with other ethnic groups in the city, is important for understanding what happened. The Detroit story is partly a story of an ethnic-sectarian conflict, just as in Kosovo, Israel, post-bellum Atlanta, or innumerable other times and places in history.
What are the practical reasons is it important to recognize and talk about the ethnic nature of the conflict? I can think of a couple:
a) The current conventional wisdom (that I learned in college) was that white flight was due to an irrational and bigoted revulsion of black people. Thus the solution to preventing future white is to re-educate white people to make them not racist. The actual story, I think, is that white flight was a result of ethnic violence. White people feared black people moving into their neighborhood, because they had the quite rational and well-supported belief that this would dramatically increase the probability of black-on-white ethnic violence. The solution, then, is to take the same techniques of law enforcement and re-education that were used with tremendous success to reduce white-on-black ethnic violence and white-on-black racism, and use those techniques to reduce black-on-white racism and black-on-white violence.
b) If you are governing a city or a country that's experiencing a large influx of ethnic migration, and that ethnic group has cultural patterns that are causing problems, you need to work on strengthening your institutions to handle that influx. And if the influx is too much and too sudden, and your rate of building institutions too slow, you might want to think about ways to limit the influx, so you can properly assimilate the migrants, before the migration overwhelms your institutions entirely and you lose the city.
Studies show that becoming criminal has nothing to do with race or background. It has to do with lack of social control from families, neighborhoods and governments.
So I think you are right but it doesn't have anything to do with being black.
Don't blame people for calling you a racist because words like "(almost entirely black)" are setting the tone of your article.
I don't know the particular study you are talking about, so it's hard for me to comment on it.
In the grand scheme of things, I'm inclined to agree that it's social control from families, neighborhoods, and governments that determines crime. In the case of the decline of Detroit, the lack of social control was intricately tried to race in all sorts of way (ex. a history of societal neglect under Jim Crow that gave rise to an underclass culture, the black power movement that gave young black men a rationale for beating on whitey, racist policing that failed to police the black projects). Again, we're not discussing race to lay blame, we're trying to understand what happened. And in the context of this discussion, I had to emphasize and highlight the racial aspect, because the parent comment to my comment specifically denied that there was any racial aspect at all.
Imagine we are talking about slavery. I can certainly imagine a study that proves that slavery is not innately based on race, but rather has to do with relations of power (black on black slavery in Africa was really common, white on white slavery used to be common in Europe, a few slaveholders in the antebellum south were black, slavery has been common in virtually all civilizations, etc). Now imagine someone denies that "whiteness" had anything to do with slave owning in the American south, and that anyone who discusess it should be shunned. Someone else replies extensively and highlights that slave owning and oppression of slaves in the American south of the 1800's was "almost entirely white" and was intricately tied to race. Is that person racist against "white" people? No. Is that blaming all whites living now for what happened then? No. Should we not talk about the racial aspect of slavery, because some racist young black men might use it has a justification for violence? No. Understanding the racial aspect of slavery in that particular time is essential for understanding what happened in that time. Similarly, understanding the racial aspect of crime in the 1960's and 1970's is essential for understanding what happened to Detroit.
I'm no stormfronter. I grew up progressive, went to progressive schools, I've volunteered in inner city neighborhoods mentoring kids and fixing up houses. I live in a neighborhood that's mostly middle class black, I play pick up football with kids from the projects, and I even have the cliched black roommate.
I studied the issue of urban decay because I spent a lot of time living near and walking through these neighborhoods. I read dozens of books and articles to try and figure out what happened. The interpretation above is the best I can do.
If you find stormfront repugnant (as I do), then don't put yourself in a position where the stormfronters are on the side of truth and you are on the side of falsehood. Otherwise you will be giving good people, who would otherwise be reasonable progressives, incentive to ally themselves with the stormfronter crowd. Recognizing the role of blacks in the destruction of Detroit's white neighbhorhoods should be viewed the same way as viewing the role of whites in the 1906 destruction of Atlanta's black neighborhoods. You can recognize and speak the truth about 1906 Atlanta without being racist against whites, and you can speak the truth about Detroit without being racist against blacks.
I would simply object that the division of blame along black/white lines is arbitrary and serves no useful purpose. I'm sure that people of every different skin tone have had a role in Detroit's decline, I just don't see the point in trying to figure out which skin tones are to more blame for what, any more than I would think it sensible to partition blame according to how much bread people ate, as if to set the bread-eaters against the rest.
Or to put my point more succinctly, a person's skin color doesn't tell us anything about them, and we shouldn't treat it as if it does. But I realize that the fundamental attribution error is deeply engrained.
I don't think anyone was claiming that skin tone mattered. Imagine you have a structure supported by two pillars, where one is painted red and the other green and weaknesses in one pillar will make the whole structure fall apart.
No one gives a damn that the pillars are different color. However, it is not politically correct to point out that there are structural weaknesses in the green pillar that need fixing simply because they are different color, so the problem is not addressed.
The pillars could be interpreted as two different communities. What make a pillar weak or strong could be social inequalities, culture, social cohesion, unemployment, etc... Political correctness in the last 40 years has made it impossible to discuss these things in public.
Mentioning the color just serves to describe which of the two pillars has the weaknesses. Nothing else.
> Mentioning the color just serves to describe which of the two pillars has the weaknesses. Nothing else.
Would that that were true. In your example, one could instead identify the cracks or other structural problems and focus on those, rather than which pillar had more of them.
Otherwise, one gets left with the impression that the color is what made the pillar weak, rather than the cracked foundations. Focusing on the color of the pillar is an unnecessary and harmful distraction.
I don't think it should be about blame at all. It's about identifying causes, so you can fix stuff and prevent it from happening again.
You can't blame any individual black or white person for what happened, unless he was personally involved in it. But you can identify what happened in specific communities and sub-communities in order to understand the processes at work. If you don't want to do that because some communities happen to be dominated by certain skin colors, you'll never understand exactly what happened.
And let's face it, in the US, skin color matters. It might not be right, but for cultural and social reasons, many people do tend to hang out with people of the same skin color, however silly that may be.
i) The overall homicide rate in Detroit rose from around ~7 per 100k in 1918 to a peak of 60 per 100k in 1991. That's nearly a 10X increase. That rise in crime was predominantly black on black and black on white. Naturally, the middle class whites who could afford it, fled the city. The book "Devil's Night" by Chafets gives some first hand documentation of the people who left, but I haven't read it. I have read "Carnasie" by Jonathan Rieder, who chronicles the exact same process in Brooklyn. Rieder's actually a liberal, but he's quite frank in his descriptions. Here a few excerpts:
Page 68: I met few residents who were strangers to street crime. If they had not been victimized, usually only one link in the chain of intimacy separated them from the victims...Most had a favorite story of horror. A trucker remembered defecating in his pants a few years earlier when five black youths cornered him in an elevator and placed a knifeblade against his throat. "They got two hundred dollars and a gold watch. They told me, 'Listen you white motherfucker, you ain't calling the law.' I ran and got in my car and set off the alarm. A group of blacks got around the car. If anybody made a move, I'd have run them over. The police came and we caught one of them. The judge gave them fucking to-year probation." The experience left an indelible imprint. He still relived the humiliation of soiling himself.
Page 69: One police officer explained that he earned his living by getting mugged. On his roving beat he had been mugged hundreds of times in five years. "I only been mugged by a white buy one time. All right, one instance, I went to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They got a huge mugging rate there. I was dressed like an old man, a scar on my face, a little blood dripping like I was just anaccident, a cast on my arm, wearing old clothes." He had been out on the street for barely five or ten minutes when a band of black youths approached him. "First words I heard were, 'Get the old white man.' Somebody got around me, I got kicked, I got punched, one guy says, 'Grab him, let's take his wallet,' I got stabbed in the hand. It was a savage thing. I also found that it was because I was white. 'Look at the old white guy', 'Let's get the old white guy,' 'Get the fucking white scumbag.' What the hell does 'white' mean?"
Page 71: Many Canarsian's, concluding that vast stretches of Brooklyn had become dangerous places, nervously shifted their patterns of movement through the city or retreated into protective asylums...Whites ceded many areas of the city, but crime followed them into Canarsie. Social policy and administrative decisions, such as housing for the poor in middle income neighborhoods, school zoning and busing schemes, and inadaquate screening of public housing, increased the permeability of the community."
Page 73: After a flurry of muggings by black youths around the subway station near the low-income project, the residents were especially unnerved...One evening dozens of people crowded into a synagogue basement to discuss the muggins. The rabbi sermonized, "...Five blacks broke the ribs and shoulder bone of the last person who was attacked. The entire perimeter of the proejct has become hazardous...."
The statistics and the anectdotal evidence are overwhelming. Urban decay happened primarily because of violence committed by a subgroup of lower class black youths against whites. Once the middle class whites and blacks had fled those neighborhoods, the remaining lower class blacks did not have the cultural or economic capital to start businesses and create jobs, so the areas remained depressed.
This pattern of violence and decay happened all across America, from Boston to L.A.. But Detroit got it the worst and has basically never recovered. Why did Detroit get it the worst? A bunch of reasons: 1) Detroit had a higher perecentage of black residents. Detroit was 29% black in 1960, Chicago 22%, Boston only 9%. 2) Detroit went a lot further with its lax policing and urban housing projects, for liberals of the time it was considered a model city 3) style of urban renewal - as I understand it, Chicago restricted most of its housing projects to certain areas which resulted in only those areas getting blighted 4) chance of leadership - sometimes its just bad luck that one city gets a particularly destructive mayor 5) decline of the automative sector. I think this factor matters, but it's been overrated. The decline of Detroit itself went into high gear from 1965 to 1975. The automobile industry didn't really start to decline until the late 70's and 80's. Overall, Detroit metro gained population from 1960 through 2000. The real economic hardship to the region didn't hit until the 2008 crisis. That said, Detroit doesn't really have a strategic location, it was something of a one industry city, and it did not have any great universities, so the decline on that industry has meant the city has basically completely died, rather than limp along like Phildalphia 6) tipping point effects - all the small differences above can combine to pass a tipping point in which the city becomes completely unlivable.
There's cities all over America that were devastated by white flight, including my neighbor across the river, East Saint Louis. If you go to downtown ESL, the base architecture and infrastructure is really cool. It has these wide boulevards and all these old style 40's and 50's architecture you don't see too much in St Louis proper. ESL High used to be an all white school, which explains the strange mix of black kids and old white people at the football games. Integration happened and the whole thing started to fall apart.
However, things really didn't start getting bad until all the BLACK people with money started leaving too. The whites moved out to St. Charles and the blacks moved out to the Illinois suburbs. Commerce (and Busch Stadium, let's be real) kept gangs from totally taking over St Louis during crack fever era, but the same did not happen in ESL. Now it's basically unfixable. The corruption, schools, and law enforcement is too awful to have anyone consider moving back there.
At least in St Louis if you have some money you can send your kids to private schools (and you would, the public school system is atrocious) in the city. Old North City has even sprung back to life with some redevelopment, and this was one of the most run down marginal neighborhoods in town a decade ago. (If you've ever been to the world famous Crown Candy Kitchen, that's the neighborhood it's in.) I live in Lafayette Square, formerly known as Slum D, which was one of the most violent neighborhoods in the US 40 years ago. My old doctor grew up there and vividly remembers what that neighborhood was like a few dozen years back. The difference between these two things and places like ESL and Detroit is the proximity of services. Even when Lafayette Square was at its worst, if you could solve the crime, downtown and Soulard were only blocks away.
Detroit and ESL are essentially urban deserts. You can live in the desert because you grew up there, but you're going to have a hard time convincing new people it's the place to be.
That begs the question: What caused that sudden and deliberate demographic shift? What shifted in? What shifted out? Whatever caused millions of people to move out of their neighborhoods must have been intimidating.
Whatever force caused people to sic dogs on elderly women marching for the right to vote must be very powerful indeed, because it sure would take a lot to make me do something so horrible.
Are you sure you want to chase this conversation down this path? I'm happy to just have us agree that economics are what fucked Detroit over.
Read The Slaughter of Cities by E. Michael Jones. I've referenced it a couple of times in this thread. The migration of blacks into Detroit and other major American cities isn't something that simply happened without a cause. That's the point behind the questions that I was asking in the thread to which you are responding.
Jones' thesis is that the Brahmin WASPs of the Northeast feared a Catholic takeover of the United States through their high birthrates. They also didn't like the fact that ethnic-dominated unions could negotiate such high wages for their workers. They wanted to break up the cohesiveness of those ethnic neighborhoods and make the children go to secular public schools instead of Catholic schools.
So, they influenced former sharecropper blacks to move north with the enticement of better jobs. The sudden population increase to cities that already suffered from post-WWII housing shortages did not bode well for good neighborly relations. Et cetera.
Most of the serious commentary that I've read of this book denounces it as a conspiracy theory. Even asking the preliminary questions needed to flesh out the thesis results in name-calling. People see the conversation turn to race and lose it. Spell things out for them and they still lose it.
Whites committed many racist atrocities to preserve white majority rule. Those who did are rightly condemned today.
However, do you believe it was legitimate for Nelson Mandela's wife and the ANC to engage in necklacing of those who opposed black majority rule in South Africa?
OK so we should come right out and say it then rather than beating around the bush. What you're trying to say is the one thing Detroit, Rhodesia, and South Africa have in common is large numbers of black people, right?
If we're going to be racist dicks we might as well get to the point, eh?
In fairness: if you're a white guy a predominantly African American lower-class neighborhood --- particularly Detroit --- and a group of young men smelling of weed are giving you the evil eye, they probably don't want to debate Wittgenstein with you.
My brother has more experience in the business and has been in the area far more than me. He called them drug dealers. I trust his judgement on the matter.
The smell of marijuana was, like I said, an added tell.
It's also pretty hilarious to hear you being scared of kids because they "smell of marijuana".
Of course, they probably did smoke pot. But this would earn them a big "so what?" from me, rather than a panicky exit.
And if they were giving you "the evil eye", that would make me wonder if you did anything to deserve it. Were you sporting bald heads, combat boots, suspenders, and German memorabilia, by any chance?
Or perhaps they'd overheard you talking to your brother about how all the black people had ruined Detroit.
How very droll of you. Maintaining foreclosed properties requires workers to take photographs of the property and secure the building, among other things; especially if the house has been broken into.
By the time we get to a property in a high-crime area, the copper is often long gone. Broken glass isn't uncommon. The amount of destruction done to some of these houses is impressive. There are holes in walls and even holes in the floor. Toilets ripped out, shattered, and left to one side.
I'm left there asking myself: Why go to all of this effort to destroy these things? What destructive impulse must some people have? It's one thing to argue about it in an Internet forum, it's something else to find it in many houses over the course of months.
On more than one occasion, we would be approached by "youths" (one of them wasn't even that young) who were clearly drug dealers. One of my brothers confirmed this to me. The smell of marijuana smoke was another tell.
pro tip for suburban residents: not all black people who smoke marijuana are drug dealers, despite what your brother 'confirms'.
it was obvious from that comment alone, and then became overwhelmingly obvious that that is why he was uncomfortable based on his other responses in the thread.
This is unsympathetically referred to as "ruin porn" around Detroit. Yes, there are an exceptional amount of abandoned buildings (there are about 600,000 people in a city that could probably comfortably hold 3x that), but there are also world class universities, sports arenas, restaurants concert venues, houses and apartments, etc.
I think being dismissive of this sort of thing ignores the bigger point. American Society has a group of people (I'm going to say age 35 and below) who had never lived through a significant downturn before this. So sites like this aren't necessarily saying "Detroit is a lost cause" they are marveling at the idea of abandon buildings which is a fairly new concept to a lot of us.
I, for example, grew up in Las Vegas and am endlessly fascinated by the Fontainebleu building (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontainebleau_Resort_Las_Vegas). It's a 68 story resort that just ran out of money after they constructed the outer structure. So this 735ft tall neon blue building just sits there in the middle of the strip waiting to be dealt with (most believe it will never be finished at this point).
But my fascination with it isn't that I think the Vegas strip is dying its just that I'd never seen something like that fail to be completed before.
I'm from Detroit, and in high school use to sneak into these abandoned buildings and take pictures. I loved it, and it was a distinct characteristic of the city for me. At the time I would have called myself an urban explorer.
There are many Detroit cheerleaders in and around the city who would dismiss this as "ruin porn" and then bash whatever media outlet published the articles. Detroit has perpetually been in a state of self-declared "renaissance" dating all the way back to the founding of the city and the motto on the city flag that translates to something along the lines of "out of the ashes rises the phoenix."
I love Detroit, and loved my time living downtown. For me, the ruins were a part of that and what I loved. It's also ultimately what led me to move as there wasn't much happening in the city. On the occasions when things did happen, they happened with banners and streamers and proclamations about how this is a testament to the cities viability.
Detroiters need to learn to love what's unique about their city. Embrace the history. Rome celebrates it's ruins, why can't we? In celebrating the ruins, maybe we can't stop being so sensitive to it and start drawing attention to the rampant corruption that has left this city in this state. Maybe if we stop ignoring the past, and its affect on the present we can shape the future.
Surely there's some interesting things to celebrate, but a 50 year old crackhouse that's still occupied by crack addicts probably isn't one of them.
What makes Rome's 'ruins' great is - well, probably a bunch of things - but certainly the longetivity is one of them. There's nothing impressive about rotting crack houses.
My real point is this: Detroiters are in denial. They all cry that the media and the world doesn't portray them properly while pretending that nothing is wrong with the city.
Celebrate the beauty that exists (Michigan Central was actually what I was thinking of with the Rome comment) and take advantage of the rest. Do you know how cheap it is to live in the city? Yes: there are acres of abandoned rotting land, but what's keeping Detroit from turning it's warehouses into startups? Imagine SOMA on a city scale.
Hah. Detroiters are in denial. Right. Detroit is in revival in the sense that there is a very small amount of investment occuring in a couple of small areas. Before this, there was NOTHING. They've gotten three or four major companies to move downtown, including the major league teams and it appears that cobo hall might even get some help from the suburbs. Seriously, prior to 2003 there was very little to talk about. It's been slow going, but I think the "revival" is real.
The thing that people miss when comparing Pittsburg and other cities to Detroit is that it is square MILES upon miles of complete ruin. The "ruins porn" is good for the city because it raises awareness of what destruction can take place when you remove the underlying economic structure from a community.
In terms of "startups", you are free to do -- there are city taxes, but it's probably doable in some areas, but keep in mind the lack of city services and that it is still a very, very dangerous city.
To be pedantic, Rome wasn't in ruins in 400AD. The Visigoths wouldn't sack it for another decade and the Vandals plunder and raped the city proper more than 50 years later. The last nominal imperator was dethroned by a barbarian in 476AD.
> How would you feel about an unending stream of
> tourists arriving daily in your hometown to pick
> over the carcasses of your ruined neighborhoods,
> taking pictures of devastation to show their friends,
> stealing souvenirs to hang on their walls at home,
> and leaving without making even the slightest effort
> to understand or improve the condition of your city?
I'm curious why one would expect tourists to improve the condition of the city. Most tourists don't go places to volunteer as part of a rebuilding error.
I assume when you mention world class universities you're referring to UM Ann Arbor -- maybe Kettering too. Is there a lot of cross fertilization between the city and the schools? Do a lot of UM students live or move to Detroit?
I'm a UM student and I can't say there's much alumni activity in Detroit itself. Grads generally either work in Ann Arbor, Metro Detroit (Birmingham, Royal Oak, etc.) or leave the state entirely.
I'm a UM grad and I live in downtown Detroit. It's amazing: great culture, music, food, night-life, and I feel safe. I took our entire office to my place before a Tiger's game last week and now multiple people are looking into moving downtown and others are interested after that graduate.
If graduates do stay in Michigan, it's to continue working or studying in the Ann Arbor area. Only a handful do find jobs in the metro Detroit area (mainly engineers and consultants), but that's a trickle opposed to the flood.
Detroit's premier college is Wayne State University, and I can not speak for its graduates.
I think the reason a lot of grads from the state of MI don't live in Detroit is there is nothing attracting them to do so. When I graduated from MSU (2005) I knew more people from MSU and U of M moving to Chicago than Detroit to work. If Detroit were anything like Chicago or any other big city you would find a lot of U of M, MSU, CMU, WMU, OU, etc grads going to live and work in the city.
The Silverdome is in Pontiac which is about a 30 minute drive from Detroit and the Lions moved out of there about 10 years ago so that's not too relevant to this topic.
Comerica Park, Ford Field, and Joe Louis Arena are actually in Detroit and they're all great facilities. Comerica Park and Ford Field are across the street from each other and both are state of the art. The area surrounding those 2 stadiums is one of the nicest parts of Detroit. Joe Louis is located on the water, a couple miles south of Comerica and Ford Field, and while it might be old, it still has a great atmosphere and is probably my favorite out of the 3.
Pretty incredible. Could've sold my house, bought that and turned the interior into a giant vegetable patch with some grazing land. A fattoria with stadium seating and reasonable exterior defenses against zombie hordes. Much more interesting than a house in the suburbs.
Some see chaos, others see opportunity. The story you're not reading about Detroit is that after hitting rock bottom in 2008 it's starting to turn around.
I've got a friend Henry Balanon who was recruited to a new startup, Detroit Labs, which is backed by Detroit Venture Partners
I've personally witnessed a number of 'unnofficial' farming efforts already underway that have never sought city permission.
Also the city under Mayor Bing has started to direct more of their limited resources towards neighborhoods that can be saved and away from lost causes.
Being from Detroit, it's great to see young tech companies springing up in the city but I think that video Knoxville did with Palladium Boots sugar coats things a bit too much. Hipsters starting underground bars/clubs and photographing urban decay is not going to revive the city.
A plan for a $500m railway was recently approved and I can't see any way it's going to be successful in its first phase. My main issue with the proposal as it is now is the fact that the line only extends to 8 mile.
For those of you unfamiliar with the city, the mile roads lie parallel to the Detroit River and span outwards all the way into rural areas. Driving into the city, things start to go downhill fast around 8 mile -- which is why everyone knows what it is now thanks to Eminem's movie. If I'm going to a sporting event or casino from my house in the burbs, I'm not going to drive 15 minutes to 8 mile, park my car in a shady parking lot, and get on a train when I could just drive another 15 minutes instead.
Anyway, for this new train venture to be even remotely successful I think the track would have to extend to at least 12 mile if the city is looking for an influx of wealthy suburbanites.
As I see in the comments here, and in general public sentiment, there is an extreme bifurcation. People who believe and people who don't.
I grew up in the suburbs and will be moving downtown in a month. A lot of people, my parents, my girlfriend and some of my friends think I am crazy. When you see pictures like this, it is hard not to blame them. But once you get past the empty buildings and wasteland, there is something magical about the city.
Not a single person who lives in Detroit does so lightly. Everyone loves this city and firmly believes in its future. It provides opportunities unlike anywhere else. For example, there are 6 bars within 500 feet of my front door. I can see Comerica Park from my bedroom. The prospect of a Tigers playoff run makes me extremely excited. No where else can I get this experience for the amount of rent I am paying.
It certainly has its problems, largely created by 30 years of inept city government and the collapse of the auto industry. But we have smart people running the city and the state and a large, well-funded, group of people who have a contagious belief in its future.
If anyone from HN is ever in town and wants to grab a beer downtown, I'd be glad to show them around.
Honestly though, all of these studies harp on different things that Pittsburgh has done than Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, etc... but the main thing that Pittsburgh has that pulls it through is fine research universities (mostly CMU and Pitt). Detroit doesn't have that, and it's hard to build. Yes, Ann Arbor is only 45 minutes away... but it's really worlds away.
(I went to CMU and UMich, CMU is much more Pittsburgh than UMich is Detroit)
They aren't very up to date. Many of these have been replaced. The velodrome is maintained by people who simply like to ride. It doesn't look like that picture at all.
We get it. There are many urban wasteland piles of crap and thousands of houses that are abandoned. Downtown Detroit is represented here by about 5% of what is actually there as far as ruins go. Next to the skyscrapers are brand new buildings housing Quicken and CompuWare among many others. Dan Gilbert actually bought a couple of the buildings shown here to move the rest of his people into. "Skyscrapers are on sale!" -- Dan Gilbert at TedXDetroit.
It's not perfect but I wonder how many people actually think that this is what is "normal". I mean come on...Irish Hills? They aren't even in the same metro area, let alone Detroit. I would need a map to even find them. Next to the "CPA" Building is one of the hottest restaurants for hundreds of miles.
I'm surprised at some of the remains, especially in the public health section - hospitals and clinics. There are rooms full of medical records, along with drugs, surgical equipment, and (possibly) radioisotopes. Probably not the latter, and they're just old x-ray machines, but the Goiânia accident[1] is what might happen if there are.
It seems almost like a desperate evacuation over hours and days, rather than, as I seem to find, over years. There's strong parallels with the photos from Pripyat in terms of the stuff left behind.
Did the city lose big chunks of population near simultaneously, or was it a constant trickle away? Why didn't the building owners make some sort of planned move? At least that way they could rip out the valuable stuff, and destroy things like medical records.
That story about Goiânia made my neck hairs raise. I wonder, did the radiological therapy machine not have any 'radiation danger' signs on it? Or maybe the scavengers ignored it, or didn't recognize it as such.
I'd like to know more background on this. Why don't people move into the empty buildings? Housing in the UK is fairly scarce and empty buildings are likely to be colonised by squatters. After ten years or so squatters can actually claim the property. I thought artists would like the opportunity to get a big studio at a discount rate, and hackers who are bootstrapping would sure make their capital go a lot further in Detroit.
In the US, we also have squatters rights, but the more common thing is a thug claims to be the "property manager", and rents space to many bums for $10/month. Smartly, he signs 2 years leases with the bums, and because of strong renters rights laws, the actual owner has to respect the leases. Now if the owner wants to rehab the building, he must go through a legal eviction process, or buyout the leases from all the squatters.
So the real property owner has to respect leases that someone who doesn't own the property made? Why don't I just go rent out someone's home right now from under them, and get protection for my 'leases'?
The law protects the renters, not the false property manager. The bums actually live in the building and pay rent. I have rented apartments plenty of times, and never once verified that the landlord is the actual property owner. I just assume I am paying the building owner or their representative. The bums are making the same assumption, and deserve renter's rights just the same. I am sure the lease could be invalidated if you could prove the bums knew the property manager did not represent the owner, but that is just as much of a legal hassle.
There's a difference between trying to rent out something that the owner lives in and takes care of and squatting on something that has been abandoned by the owner.
The problem is that many of the properties are likely in legal limbo through foreclosure, bank ownership, and auctions. Once a new true owner finally takes over it might have been years since the last real owner. That's when squaters rights start to come into play.
Sure it's cold, but it's cheap and apparently still has decent facilities. I'm not sure on the crime -- how much is that story a media beat-up? Are there other parts of the US where you can be near a large urban centre and pay virtually nothing? (It's an honest question! And yes, I could probably look this up somewhere.)
"Anecdote isn't the plural of datum", and all of that, but here's a point for the scatterplot. I was in Detroit visiting family a year or so ago, and we spent a day driving around the downtown area sightseeing (featuring commentary by elderly relatives about theaters, stores, restaurants, etc.). At one point, while leaving the Indian Village neighborhood, we came across a police roadblock; a series of U-turns and detours revealed that, in fact, the police had closed off an area several blocks on a side including a good-sized stretch of Jefferson (a major road in Detroit). There were several police helicopters buzzing around, lots of armed cops, etc. etc. This was during rush hour. After talking to some of the officers and some bystanders, we discovered what was happening: somebody had, upon being evicted from some sort of residential treatment facility, begun threatening people with a gun. When the police arrived, he shot at them, and then ran away. The police were currently trying to figure out which of several buildings he was in, and had closed off most of a neighborhood as well as a major street to try and contain the situation.[1]
In most cities, this sort of thing (major police operation, shots exchanged between police and armed member of public, street closures, etc.) would have been big news; that night, none of the local news broadcasts even mentioned it (one traffic report that afternoon did mention the closure of Jefferson, but didn't go into details). No headlines in the paper the next day, either.[2] My point here is that this sort of thing was apparently commonplace enough that it wasn't considered to be a newsworthy event, and none of my Detroit relatives seemed particularly surprised or concerned.
1. Notably, the particular chunk of neighborhood in question was at least half-abandoned (judging from the amount of ivy covering every second house).
2. Technically, by "the paper the next day," I mean the Detroit Free Press's website. At that point in time the DFP wasn't printing week-day paper editions.
Downtown Detroit, where many of the pictures were taken, is actually much safer than the US on average. But people would rather live in a sprawling suburb.
That's been the thought of most of the country for a long time as many either move to the coast or want to move to the coast and just can't afford it. A great second choice (first for some) is a mountain city like Denver (or nearby Boulder). Or, if you really don't care about mountains or ocean then a city like Austin at least has great weather and overall vibe.
To each his own, but I will never live in the middle of the country and will always either need to be near the beach or mountains (I did the mountains the last couple years and am again near the beach).
At my last job I biked through North Philly everyday. There are some ok neighborhoods, but there are plenty of abandoned strips that look like they were bombed in WWII.
It's so sad because you can look at them and say "that used to be a department store and that was a grocery store" and you can almost imagine the people walking around in the 70s (the last time there was probably activity).
But these Detroit photos with theaters and libraries and rec centers closed....damn.
What bugs me about the poverty-porn you see from Detroit is that if you really wanted to, you could do the same documentation in the wealthiest segments of Los Angeles, just by going a few blocks over.
If I really wanted to, I could take my DSLR over to Canoga Park in Los Angeles and make it seem like I'm in a third world country. It's less than a mile from my home.
Sure, you can do that in certain parts of LA. But you can see these ruins almost everywhere in Detroit. It's really one of the most depressing cities I've ever been to.
Yea - Detroit is a sobering experience. I was honestly in shock the first time I went downtown. Bad parts of town and abandoned or nearly abandoned plazas are not new to me, but the scale of decay in Detroit - 20,000 people on the streets! - is overwhelming and depressing.
I get your point that there is "ruin porn" in almost any city.
I don't think you get my point though. Detroit is almost entirely "ruin porn", there are no million dollar homes next to any ruins in Detroit, I doubt there are any million dollar homes in Detroit at all.
This is essentially a "Tu Quoque" -- other cities have bad parts, so how can we point fingers at Detroit?
It's ok for both LA and Detroit to have bad parts. But I think it's disingenuous to pretend that Detroit's downfall is anywhere near that of other cities (unemployment, scale of abandonment, population decline, etc.).
I have lived in both LA and Detroit. These are really different animals. I read somewhere that you could fit the entire city of San Francisco in the vacant lots of Detroit.
Also, you can easily find lots of property in Detroit for 5000 USD or less. I was at an auction where abandoned homes were going for less than 500 dollars.
I have no doubt that LA and Detroit are very different. Just in raw statistics they are very different.
The point is, if your view of any city is from reddit/hackernews/tumblr/cracked/digg-bait sites, it will be a skewed view on a city. With Detroit, its post-apocolyptic ruin-poverty porn.
Not exactly the same neighborhood, but there's already a documentary that covers poverty in LA, although there's an obvious focus on the history of racial tension and gang violence: http://www.cripsandbloodsmovie.com/
But yeah, you can find ruins in most major US cities. I grew up in Upstate NY and abandoned factories are just background scenery to me. What's interesting about Detroit is the scale of what's happening. Personally that's why I will often check out the "ruin porn" when I see it (and I'm usually disappointed), because I want to get an idea about what it's actually like there, I don't just want to gawk at the devastation.
If you drive down Woodward Ave. to go to a Tigers game you get the sense you are in postwar Germany in parts. Some of the highrise buildings have facades on them so they look like functional buildings from the baseball stadium. However when you walk around the back side, the windows are blown out and they are abandoned.
My new business plan:
1. Abandon the city for the wealthy suburbs
2. Leave the poor behind, defund infrastructure
3. Sell tours and photos of neglect and destruction
4. Profit!
Some things to consider:
* While the population of Detroit proper has fallen, the total population of the metro area has remained fairly static over the past 40-50 years http://www.somacon.com/p469.php
* The Detroit suburbs are just as nice as your typical American suburbia.
* The State of Michigan is training hundreds of Emergency Financial Managers who now have the power to go into any municipality the State deems "financially unsustainable," dissolve local governments, and terminate any contracts (union or otherwise) in order to force a balanced budget. So while urban areas continue to be defunded by the state and by fleeing wealthy residents, they are put in the precarious position of trying to balance their budgets or risk a hostile takeover.
* Meanwhile, we all have a good time looking at the pictures.
Detroit is not its abandoned buildings. It is Midtown and Woodbridge, it is Boston-Edison and Indian Village, it is Eastern Market and the rekindled downtown blocks. Detroit is the "Live Midtown" campaign, the "Live Downtown" campaign, and the M1 rail alliance. It is grass-roots groups & websites like TweeTea and Detroit Moxie.
I'm not a Detroit native, but I see this city for what it is: a mountain of opportunity for anyone who can see past the popular headlines.
This isn't just a Detroit problem. Residents of just about every mid-to-high pop. city could pick a few eerily similar buildings on this site left in the very same states.
Living in Ontario, Canada, I can say our situation isn't quiet as progressed as Detroit, but the cracks are definitely starting to show. I think Detroit shows signs of what is to come on a larger scale if we don't start putting people and civics as a front-and-center issue.
Detroit's pain should serve as a great education and not simply thought of as a worst case scenario.
Not all is lost for Detroit, as it is in a great position of pivot that would normally be masked by the bureaucracy of a "well run" city.
Each year a large number of people come to Detroit from around the world to photograph and then publish either articles or entire books on the "ruin porn" in Detroit. Some of these books sell for a pretty penny.
I know all about that city, and let me tell you I seriously doubt it is anything close to the opportunity that exists elsewhere.
Just because 'some' money is coming in doesn't mean it will come out of the slump that _IS_ Detroit. Between scandals (do i really need to cite?), poor getting even poorer (which is insane), the violence[1][2], and people leaving [3], it makes it a hard choice for anyone to want and stay. The real unemployment rate is hovering around 50%[4] for goodness sake!
It will take years and hundreds of times more money that is coming in to get that city back. Until that happens the city is not going anywhere but down.
Though houses are being given away for $1000[4], and stats that show it is really cheap to live in Detroit (really, i wonder why) doesn't mean it's a good deal!
If your a hacker, debug your situation. Get out before you get caught in a segfault or infinite loop.
It's pretty clear you don't know "all about" Detroit, it's nice that you quote a few articles though (especially one from 2009).
The opportunity that I mentioned is not in residential (yet) although I would be a buyer of raw land near downtown.
There are some truly awful areas, but there are also some really great areas of Detroit -- especially Midtown -- where there are very low vacancy rates and an influx of college grads who want to live in a vibrant urban environment.
Billionaires are buying (with both hands) commercial buildings for pennies on the dollar. I'm going to bet they know a bit more about "opportunity" than the authors of your articles.
Well being a billionaire means you knew how to make money from a market yesterday. It doesn't really mean they know how tomorrow. Odds will be better as you have resources to try but everything is a gamble. Knowing the odds help.
And so with that, I say the odds aren't so good in Detroit. The market is constantly shrinking. That is fact (see the wiki link). This spills over to exports as well. The last saving grace are the auto manufacturers, but as most economists say the reliance on them for exports must end[5].
For all you know the 'billionaires' will frack[1] all the entire land and what will you have then? Or maybe foreign nationals are buying the land to level it for agriculture, and not high tech or manufacturing which keeps jobs [2][3][4]. That would be nice, to see a farm land back on Detroit soil.
Yes maybe selling that $1k piece of land for $2k would be a good deal. You just made 2x or maybe even 10x (if you could) there. But who are you going to sell it to?
I've seen plenty of people and huge think tank laden corps (investment firms, banks, etc...) with massive amount of money blow it all for stupid decisions. Including during the 2008 CDO mess. Or just look at the current Euro zone situation, they're STILL bleeding.
Yes what is happening to Detroit is also happening to the rest of the USA. The only thing is Detroit was ground zero.
Rather than 'follow billionaires' I choose to forge my own path with my fellow entrepreneurs learning from all of this horrible mess.
When you 'forge' your own path with fellow entrepreneurs who are learning -- will you grant more weight to those who have proven to succeed?
How about those who built more successful (at least from a financial perspective) than 99.99999% of the world and have the power and resources to enact real change?
Haven't you heard, a recent article [1] gives 13 reasons there is a comeback, and it has some interesting nuggets:
- unemployment is 11.3% (not 50%)
- high tech jobs growing over 100% yoy
- ranked 46/150 for growth (opposed to 146 previously)
Will you agree to come back to HN in 10 years (assuming HN will be around), and we shall gauge whether Detroit's growth is explosive or slow? Enough to reverse the population and poverty statistic trends?
I always wonder how entire cities ended up as ruins that were then lost and subsequently found by archeologists. It seems like what is going on in Detroit and other cities and towns is similar to what must have happened in many city's cases over the millennia.
Detroit and Pontiac are not the kinds of places that one would care to go by oneself, even for muscular young men. On more than one occasion, we would be approached by "youths" (one of them wasn't even that young) who were clearly drug dealers. One of my brothers confirmed this to me. The smell of marijuana smoke was another tell. Once, we were leaving a property just as several police cars were converging on a group of huddled young men. Those young men had been giving us the evil eye and my brother hurried us out of there.
In some houses, the mold grew as tufts of fur spackling the walls in patches bigger than a man's hand. Garbage, broken furniture, and other debris was piled higher than our waists in some houses; the previous tenants had been mentally ill hoarders. We hiked through those rooms more than we walked into them.
Last winter, we found a house where ice covered the basement up to a foot below the roof. I stepped on the ice on the stairs going down and my foot cracked through. I missed a cold and putrid bath by catching the walls just in time.
When they first went into that business, my brothers were assured that -- sooner or later -- they would come upon a drug house or a dead body.
I live in the suburbs. I do not want to live in Detroit.