Devil's Night (Detroit: appointed, insurance, how much)

[Cliffie]

I was getting my blood drawn today on the West side and mentioned that tonight is Devil's Night. All the lab assistants chorused, "Ohh, you're right, it's ANGEL's Night and they're going out on watch!"

A couple of points on this:

A) I always wonder how much of the furor over this is just media hyperbole. All my life growing up on the East Side, Devil's Night was a harmless sub-holiday that allowed kids to TP trees and egg windows before going back the next night asking for free candy. Somehow, right around the year I left, it turned into this city-wide arson festival -- except I'd never heard about any actual buildings burning. Not one.

B) Next thing I know, it had turned into this massive Neighborhood Watch initiative to STOP THE ARSON. Funny how people focus on the arson and not the tremendous grassroots efforts to protect what are, after all, abandoned buildings.

C) Multiple stories like this -- the whole city massing on the streets to prevent Devil's Night arson, tremendous efforts to make sure every underprivileged kid in Detroit has a winter coat, volunteers pouring into the soup kitchens and rescue missions to help their neighbors at Thanksgiving and Christmas -- NONE of it seems to dent Detroit's lousy reputation. WHY?

[and the]

It's not what it used to be. I ran into a vanload of Japanese firemen, all the way from Japan, on Devil's Night back about 1987. They literally came all that way to see the city burn, and they weren't disappointed. I saw them at several fires that night.

[dmetro]

Arson doesn't really exist there as much anymore because they've already burned most of the buildings lol. (Not really.) But in case you're wondering, one of the reasons that Detroit had such a high arson rate years ago was that people inentionally burned their own homes and businesses. White flight was in full swing and their property values were plummeting because of it, so rather than trying to sell their homes, many people just set them on fire and blamed the arsonists. They would then collect the insurance, just leave the burnt shell of the house and move to one of the suburbs. I'm not saying that all arsons were like this, but many of them were.