What Makes Flint, MI so miserable? (Detroit, Traverse City: jobs, crime, suburbs)

[dxiweodwo]

just wondering

[hillside]

no economy. no jobs. bad schools. loss in population. crime. flint has all of the problems of detroit on a smaller scale. i have family in flint and its depressing to visit. i enjoy my time up there because of my family but it's not a great place to live.

[Trabbz]

No offense to anyone, but whenever I see pics of it (I have never been there), it looks like the worst craphole in the US. Seems like it is quickly becoming a modern day ghost town.

[metro223]

If I had to guess, the moderators will move this to the Michigan forum. Its one particular topic, and it's not general. Just saying from what I've seen.

[GLPman]

Most accurate description: Everytime the economy budges, it takes Flint, flips it on its head, and proceeds to bang it on the ground.

[The_Anonymous_American]

Flint is the most overrated "bad" city in America because it is really just a bad neighborhood that you can easily avoid while living in some rather nice suburbs. The metro Detroit area is much worse than the Flint area. As someone who lives in the Flint area, I find the Detroit area to be much more depressing because there is no way to avoid the glum and beaten down feeling of even the so called better towns in metro Detroit.

[famlife]

growing up there, and not coming from the nicest of neighborhoods, i'll give u my theory...

i believe that the problem started with joblessness.. no opportunities for unskilled laborers, so when they lose their jobs (which a LOT of them have) all they have to go to is gas stations, walmarts, etc... their kids grow up in the ghetto and after a few generations, it becomes the norm. babies are having babies, people don't get educated, people don't want to work, they grow up not seeing people work.. so alot of them either have kids and live off the system, or if they have high aspirations, they make money the easy and fast (and illegal) ways. which sometimes requires causing harm to the people who do have money.
i didn't go more than a few months accumulatively throughout my high school years, no truancy, i had random grades on my report card, random absences.. I KID YOU NOT! the security guard at my high school was actually shot in the back! you couldn't walk down the hall without hearing cracker this, cracker that... expletives thrown in for good measure... i knew at least a couple girls who had babies with more than one person before they were old enough to by cigarettes.
the thing is, it's become a culture. alot of the people in the ghetto mentality there love it. my nephew (who i was trying to "save") hated it here cause cause there was no trouble to get into, and he couldn't find any drugs and he couldn't walk down the street with a pint of liquor in his hand, etc.. he amused himself by pulling stop signs out of the ground. he claims he's not in a gang, but all his friends are gang members and he wont wear certain colors and throws gang signs like it's going out of style (wish it was...)

plus the air tastes like you stuck a coney dog in an exaust pipe, drove to the flint river, dipped it.. and chewed on it for a day and a half.

flint is like a black hole. it's a cesspool. i'll never live in such an industrialized city again. or even michigan. or the midwest for that matter! flint has problems beyond this. these are just some symptoms, not the disease.

[Hangargal]

Making it a modern day ghostown would be doing it a favor. That might boost tourism.

[writerdeman]

Originally Posted by famlife

growing up there, and not coming from the nicest of neighborhoods, i'll give u my theory...

i believe that the problem started with joblessness.. no opportunities for unskilled laborers, so when they lose their jobs (which a LOT of them have) all they have to go to is gas stations, walmarts, etc... their kids grow up in the ghetto and after a few generations, it becomes the norm. babies are having babies, people don't get educated, people don't want to work, they grow up not seeing people work.. so alot of them either have kids and live off the system, or if they have high aspirations, they make money the easy and fast (and illegal) ways. which sometimes requires causing harm to the people who do have money.
i didn't go more than a few months accumulatively throughout my high school years, no truancy, i had random grades on my report card, random absences.. I KID YOU NOT! the security guard at my high school was actually shot in the back! you couldn't walk down the hall without hearing cracker this, cracker that... expletives thrown in for good measure... i knew at least a couple girls who had babies with more than one person before they were old enough to by cigarettes.
the thing is, it's become a culture. alot of the people in the ghetto mentality there love it. my nephew (who i was trying to "save") hated it here cause cause there was no trouble to get into, and he couldn't find any drugs and he couldn't walk down the street with a pint of liquor in his hand, etc.. he amused himself by pulling stop signs out of the ground. he claims he's not in a gang, but all his friends are gang members and he wont wear certain colors and throws gang signs like it's going out of style (wish it was...)

plus the air tastes like you stuck a coney dog in an exaust pipe, drove to the flint river, dipped it.. and chewed on it for a day and a half.

flint is like a black hole. it's a cesspool. i'll never live in such an industrialized city again. or even michigan. or the midwest for that matter! flint has problems beyond this. these are just some symptoms, not the disease.

Come on, you live in one or two towns in the midwest, then you write off the whole region based on that experience. That drives me nuts. Say you don't like Flint. Say you don't like Detroit (or whatever area you lived in), but don't say you hate Michigan or the entire midwest! I've lived on the North Shore of Lake Ponchartrain in Louisiana for 3 years, and I can't wait to get back to the midwest, and Michigan in particular! I live in the Traverse City area and I love it there!

[kaypurdue]

It's become a culture of failure - like there is no shame in not working hard, not getting an education, getting in trouble with the law, etc.

There are good things happening in the city, but it's not going to get better overnight. There has to be a major attitude adjustment in the population as a whole - not easy to do when you're talking about the 100K people or so that live there. Even plopping 10,000 high-paying unskilled jobs into our laps isn't going to solve everything (though it would help ).