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Totally agree. I want to come to Detroit for college and everyone thinks i'm nuts, but I see what Detroit can become and that's what motivates me to give the city a shot.
Forgot to mention, I noticed that first pic with all the trash is right there at Rosa Parks blvd & Antoinette St. It's amazing how R.P. BLVD changes so drastically. It's fairly nice south of I-75 but after that it goes way downhill. You get some intermittent spots of development and then WHAM!! Back into decay.
I find Detroit completely fascinating. That Detroityes site is fun, and so are a lot of the older posts at Detroitblog.com.
Sometimes I tell the husband that we ought to pack it up, buy some dirt cheap real estate down there, raise some dairy goats and vegetables and chickens among the urban decay.
The weather would be much milder than my current town in AK... a geezer's paradise, right!?
Mayor Young and Kilpatrick and city council are squarely to blame for this mess.
30 years after the riots and still no progress.
If Dr King were alive today he would be appalled at these photos.
2 people are to blame? Not the hundreds of thousands who abandoned the city before those two had any influence? Not the suburbs' staunch opposition to being politically associated with Detroit, thus keeping it an isolated ghetto without a middle class whose tax dollars and private investments could fund restoration? Not the global industrial shift of capitalism to the cheapest and least regulated markets? No.... just a couple of guys.
I grew up near there and now live in Boston. I don't know where that person has been - I've never seen anything like that in Boston. I will say, however, that the day we all stop pointing the finger at "them" and wonder when "they" are going to clean up "their" city and realize that these conditions are because of a global consciousness created by all of us - in Detroit, in Miami, New Orleans (take away the tourist districts of South Beach and the French Quarter and you have the same crushing levels of poverty). I understand why people left Detroit - their families. But now we need to expand our definition of self-interest beyond what is best for ourselves and toward what is best for all - which is just a larger version of ourselves.
So long as there's poverty, we are all impoverished. But Detroit is particularly fascinating - it's like an open slate to build a sustainable city - urban farming, research and development as the arsenal for a new green industrial revolution...
coffeehound - I find urban decay fascinating as well, although not strictly in Detroit.
Hopefully Detroit can pick itself up by its bootstraps and start revitalization. St. Louis has been working on that for about 5 years I think, so I think Detroit can revitalize, too.
I also find it unfair and inaccurate to blame two people for the current situation in Detroit but let's be honest....have they assisted at all in turning things around? Have they helped reverse the last 30 years of trends in the area? Those are rhetorical questions as most (including many in the city I would imagine) would say no.
Bluefly, I also have trouble with the logic that people who moved away from others caused the latters' poverty; there is good reason to argue that illiberal, uncaring suburbanites (or soon to be) moving out of Detroit would have made things BETTER for the persons they were allegedly oppressing. People moving away from others or as you put it "...the hundreds of thousands who abandoned the city before..." are unlikely the cause of all or even some of the problems continually encountered by those in the city today. Again, people moving away from others by itself does not cause others who are left to fall into poverty. I think one could even argue that people moving away from others (especially if those persons were not industrious or parasitic) would leave those left BETTER OFF than before. I know I have always had neighbors I wished would move away. Let's be fair to Bluefly, however, the people who moved away (as I recall from my schooling) did have access to loans (to buy or build housing) that was not available to all racial/ethnic groups (blacks mainly in this case). In other words, some people had more options than others....but that does not address why anybody wanted to leave a city that TR and Presidents before used to vacation in and why people felt they needed to, at that point, exercise those options…..nor, why people feel like they need to keep moving out (even today).
I used to teach in Detroit and it frustrated me when it seemed half my students at university age could not read and were pumped with 1 sided political propaganda. Moreover, I think this administration did little to reverse the cultural aversion to education...making it "less-Detroiter" to study, read, be different, be everything you can be. 'Hip-hop mayor' kind of speaks for itself. Lastly, calling Michigan the Mississippi the of the North during elections (he did not, but a 501 c 3 that supported his administration did) does tend to upset a great many who pride themselves on being tolerant, open and diverse in color as well as intellectually (something the city cannot boast about---especially towards the non-religious and homosexual communities----this statement is based on numerous data from reputable polling organizations---I’m away from that right now but do some internet searches on tolerance and openness).
No "global consciousness", however curiously defined, created this. I have taught in 3rd world countries without bathrooms in their schools, no heat in their radiators and textbooks 30 years old---with higher literacy rates than Detroit, as well as many other parts of this country. Detroit, in other words, is not even close to being poor compared to these kids. How then do they excel while we fail?
Call me a sucker but I call it values. Values should not be confused with "picking yourself up by your bootstraps" which is not always possible, perhaps....but Detroit still possesses the ability to do so--they just need to make the decision to do it.
By the way, I'm from Detroit but moved away recently
chimerea32 - I'm sorry, perhaps I was not clear. I was not talking about the abandonment of the city causing those people to go into poverty. It's just a simple fact, though, that when there is no middle class creating jobs that people can easily get to, no effort to create public transportation for those people to get there, no interaction between classes so people can see culture beyond urban poor, and no tax revenue or private investment from the middle / upper classes because they live on the other side of an arbitrary political boundary, then the city is naturally going to collapse and those who cannot escape collapse with it.
I used to work in the inner city as well. While the cards are stacked heavily against anyone from there, there are clearly social norms from within, as the ones you mentioned, that prevent people from aspiring beyond the status quo because it's viewed as selling out. If you want my blatant opinion - I think behind all that tough bravado is an extraordinary weakness to break from the pack. Nothing's going to change within that culture until that attitude changes - but I'm not talking about the people. I'm talking about the city.
The "global consciousness" point was simply in reference to the fundamental values of self-interest defined narrowly around oneself and his/her family that allow a competition-dependent, expansion-dependent economic system to force jobs to flow like water to the lowest common denominator. I think it worked incredibly well for many decades and centuries, but now it's time to move on. So long as we live in this consciousness, there will always be poverty in Detroit and India and Thailand and wherever else.
thank you for your thoughtful comments.
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2 people to blame?
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