OT- Is Detroit really dying?

it is truly a tragedy what has happened in detroit.

I was just in Detroit last weekend. It is truly in a bad situation. Nobody lives there. The outskirts are all abandoned houses with broken windows and boarded up doors. Even in Grosse Pointe one of the most wealthy areas in America, is abandoned, but you wouldn't realize it because the lawns are still kept up and the police patrol day and night. The houses are all empty though.

I went out in Grosse Point on Friday night and the street was empty, no cars, no people. I walked into a bar called the Rustic Cabin and there was a single bartender with no patrons. The city is quite literally a wasteland. All weekend I did not see a single grocery store. It is sad. I wish I knew of a way to revitalize the city, but I fear it would take a team of people and the incentives in doing so would be more charitable at this point than for profit.

If you're going to copy and paste someone else's article, you should at least acknowledge who it's from.

It's not really dying. It's moving. The populace continues to move away from the slums and abandoned areas to outskirts and nearby communities.

So it is true. That's amazing. I guess it's the modern version of the Inca cities that were just abandoned in the jungles?

It is pretty disheartening to hear about how badly Detroit is doing, but as long as this decay doesn't threaten AA I think I'll be able to sleep at night.

"We have never seen anything like this in American history. It is happening under our noses, but the media refuse to discuss it."

1) It's happened plenty of times.
2) It's patently absurd to say the "media refuse to discuss it."

The town of Huntington, WV had something like 150,000 people living in it at the end of WWII. It's down to about 40,000 now. Youngstown, Ohio, the towns of the Lehigh Valley in PA, Scranton, PA.

There were plently of mill towns in New England that evaporated when people figured out that it was cheaper to run them in the South. Likewise, it's cheaper to build cars in Alabama and South Carolina and Tennessee.

This is the way free markets are supposed to work. Competition forces industries to compete and evolve. After WWII, Germany and Japan's steel industry had to completely rebuild...since we blew up their factories. As a result, they were able to modern steel companies that were more efficient. Plus, they were able to ramp up production and compete with England and the US. Steel prices dropped and companies like US Steel had to evolve. I think they're mostly a chemical company now, aren't they?

Bethlehem Steel was the second-largest producer and they ended up going bankrupt and got eaten by a new company, International Steel Group. ISG ended up merging with Arcelor and Mittal, two European companies.

All of those mill towns, BTW, ended up evaporating in the South after NAFTA was passed. The theory is that it's a waste of American worker productivity to have them doing mindless textile work. Those jobs have been replaced with tech companies like Red Hat, pharmaceutical companies like Abbot Labs and whatever the hell Burroughs Welcome and Glaxo and the rest merged into, and industries like Cree.

The Great Lakes region has water and cheap land. Eventually, someone will figure out how to utilize those two resources and the next chapter will start. Economies, like rivers, are very messy and destructive when they run backwards.

And to say that the media isn't covering it...it's just absurd. There have been countless articles on the urban farming in Detroit, the de-annexation of neighborhoods, and the struggles people have as they get left behind.

A few years ago, I went to Comerica for a Tigers game with my buddy. We decided we wanted to find free parking. We parked it on a nearby street in a neighborhood. Probably wasn't the wisest move, but I definitely saw boarded up homes, broken windows, and even holes in the sidewalk so big that I could have fallen in. I've never seen anything like it. There may be some pockets in really bad areas around the country, but even driving through the city, it's like a ghost town.

If a mayor like Giuliani gets recognition for his leadership and transforming cities, imagine the national recognition one would get if he/she revived Detroit.

however, there are pockets in the immediate downtown and midtown area that are pretty decent. political leaders have bled the city dry and most have moved to the suburbs. honestly though, with some recent and future planned development, and bing taking over as mayor, it seems it might, a very small might, have a chance to improve. if you want a microcosm of what has ruined detroit, check out this article:

http://detnews.com/article/20100304/OPINION03/3040437/Does-DPS-leader-s-...

"is totally backwards from what should be happening. Which is people moving into cities, easing the environmental burden of increased transportation and land use"

You have two things working against you here.

1) The environmental burden in the greater Detroit area has already been pretty taxing on the land. I wish I had a link to it, but there's a map about 20 feet from where I'm typing this that shows the brownfield zones in the US. Saginaw, for instance, is one giant brownfield. Flint's another.

2) The United States is basically empty. If I remember the state correctly, something like 2/3 of the country lives within 100 miles of a coast. So that's leaves 100 million people to occupy fly-over country. The US is 3000 miles across, so an area 2800 miles wide and about 1,500 miles tall? That's 4.2 million (if I counted my zeroes right) square miles? That's 23 people per square mile. So, 1/13th the population density of Japan, 1/10th the density of Germany and the UK.

People are going to spread out, for economic reasons if not for social ones.

One of the biggest issues is that for so long Detroit was a one horse town, by that I mean it had one (albeit a massive industry) industry, the automobile. Everything else was based on it. Sure you had Ford/Chrysler/GM but it was all cars, then there was all the car part manufactutors, again lots of them but still all focused on a single industry. The industry peaked at around 1950-1960, since then it has been dying a slow prolonged death. The government has prolonged the death due to interveneing in to prevent the death of Chrysler in the 1980's, and again here for both it and GM. These 'interventions' help in the short term but actually hurt in the long run, they allow sick weak businesses that have proven unable to adapt to the changing times to continue to be sick and weak. Clearly Chrysler learned nothing, what confidence do any of us have they they or GM will fare any better?
I believe these to be economic issues not political so I will continue.

There were in fact a number of economists that were saying there were issues with the housing in America much sooner than 2005. Too many 'new' houses being built and too many new loans being taken out by people that realistically should not be making said loans. This created a issue that built and built until it crashed. Older homes in urban areas are some of the least desired and least likely to be bought, especially in a city such as Detroit which has few other economic industries to drive it.

Mayor Bing is trying to go a new direction, which is to actually shrink the city. It is a good thought, but one that will force people to make hard choices. The city must rebuy the run down areas, clear the blight, consolidate people to areas that it can provide services/schools for and let the vacant areas, remain so until there is an industry/business that wants to establish itself there. They should rezone/replan the areas for future growth and get on with life as a city that isn't what it once was. Michigan as whole needs to get over the auto industry and diversify.

Sorry my two cents grew to two dollars.

Unions and entitlement kill any economy. Detroit is getting what it deserves.

Isn't Chrysler pretty much assured of its future for the next 50 years just through it's military contracts? They make the Abrhams tank and Jeep. Both of those have Army contracts through 2050, so they will be around in SOME form, even if they aren't making many domestic vehicles.