I thought what I always thought since visiting that POS city when I worked for Springsteen. Abandon it.
Leave like you're fleeing a zombie horde Detroit - leave it or die with it. A heavily hit recession state, a city with a corrupt government and infrastructure build for 2 Million inhabitants, not the 900K that live there now. How do I know this, I was born at Hutzel hospital, lived on Wilfred as a child until busing was an issue and then my parents moved us to Shelby Township - the mighty white suburbs. I worked at Ford on Oakwood and I-94, originally Body and Assembly now Vehicle Operations, had a house in Dearborn Heights (Warren/Telegraph), earned my masters in BioMechanical Engineering in '06 at Wayne State. There is NO FREAKING WAY that I will move back there. Hope has left the building. I had the opportunity to go through Fords warehouse, the old Model T plant, in Highland Park - Beirut, Baghdad and any modern war zone looks like an improvement by comparison to that city or Detroit. My drive down the Lodge was always *interesting*. I had a quarterly appointment at Henry Ford Hospital downtown and made sure that I drove a company owned vehicle to that appointment. Never, ever stop at a stop light or stop sign without an alternative, emergency plan - I've had to do it twice.. The city is dying, someone just needs to pull the plug. For those readers unfamiliar with Detroit, check out this photo essay from Time magazine: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089,00.html
I was shooting pool in Royal Joke a couple of days after Coleman Young's death and his contribution to Detroit came up... we all tossed in our .02 cents and a fellow over at the other table said Coleman Young deserved a monument in his honor.... I informed him that there was one..... it's called Oakland County!!!!
I didn't catch Dateline, but I read an interesting article in a magazine last month. Basically there's an entrepreneur who wants to turn the Detroit area into an agricultural mecca. He's got a lot of fascinating ideas about greenhouses and warehouses and how it will use green energy and create jobs. Like anything it needs money and help from the bureaucrats. I'm not convinced it's feasible, but to his credit, he's trying to pull something positive out of one of the worst places in the US.
I saw a TV program on Las Vegas (on French television) that said it had more foreclosures than Detroit. Any truth to that?
Money and help from the bureaucrats may have killed Detroit but there is a kind of news blackout on that topic....
Probably. Vegas was the largest growing city in the US for a long time, it's absolutely huge compared to the first time I went out there.
Im sure Detroit will live again. Its just a matter of when. Maybe beyond anyones life on this board. I can't see an infrastrucutre as large as that being completley abandoned
I think Detroit will someday be better. However, people never move TO Detroit. They only leave. Until that changes, the city will only become more broke. I think the schools are 200 or 300 MILLION in the hole right now.
While watching the special on Detroit I was reminded with how so many of high crime cities like Detroit seem to try to solve that crime problem by concentrating on the obvious tools of crime instead of attacking the reason for the high crime. You can't fight crime by constantly finding bigger, stronger locks and fences. You go to the source of that crime and fix that. Concentrating on keeping kids in school, eliminating the desire to join gangs by pointing kids in another direction, actually confronting parents that don't do their job in raising those kids with the harsh truth about their lives, or the lack thereof, and shaming those parents into accepting their responsibilities. It's time to quit this stupidity of being PC, and gentle, with those that shirk their responsibilities. We must poke a finger into the chest of parents and insist that they do their jobs. That's where crime is solved.
I read that same article and it sounds like a hell of an idea to me. If I remember correctly, there was something like 40 sq miles of abandoned areas within the city of Detroit that could be converted back into agricultural use. People could actually learn to be more self sustaining again by having community farms. I would bet that if a large portion of those people learned how to take care of feeding themselves the self esteem levels would skyrocket. Yeah, yeah, I know. It ain't gonna happen. I can dream though.
Those guys aren't gonna farm. They have bridge and WIC cards to buy food for free with. Even if the farms all do get going, I can damn near promise they'll never make 10 years before the program gets F'ed up with some political scandal. Or they'll get sued for using the wrong pesticides or some stupid shit.