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1. There are only 4 cities in the US with over 2 million residents , New York, Los Angeles , Chicago, Houston
All of which are financially sound
2. Detroit is in Michigan , a state that had been mostly controlled by the GOP for the last 40 years . It's hard to make an argument that a strong governor state like Michigan had no influence over the state of it's largest city and cultural/ economic heart.
Detroit, like much of Michigan and the Rust Belt didn't diversify it's economic portfolia , that's why it fell off the way it did . That's not a Dem or GOP problem, it's a human one.
With Detroit there were some serious macro economic issues involved. Transitioning from a blue collar to white collar economy is not easy.
Pittsburgh has probably set the standard for how it's done, and even then it's involved right-sizing the metro area to a population level it can support.
There is a lot of Detroit city that may never have a viable use again, and could be reverted to greenbelt.
Hudson Cafe is close. It is good but pricey. We have had over 330 new taverns and restaurants open in the last 7 years, so we have lots of great options that we can walk to (although I went out to my truck and ate some leftovers for lunch today (wanted to take a nap).
Grand Trunk is down the street a bit. It is a neat place. It used to be connected to an awesome Irish tavern called Forans. They changed the name and eliminated the dozen plus corned beef offerings a few years ago, but they still have some vestiges of the old Irish menu that are really good. The atmosphere is great it is in an old streetcar station.
People are posting on here about the Detroit of 2008. This is a different city now. It is a really awesome city downtown and midtown (and now the stadium district. However there are no more $4,000 homes. Those same houses are $90,000 now unless you get out to the neighborhoods that are still emptying out. Not too many of those and the $4,000 houses are tear downs. However if you have a house next to an empty lot that the city owns, the city will sell you that lot for $500. That is a nice perk.
It is hard to turn your head and not see a different building that is being restored. Unfortunately it appears that by the time I finally win the lotto, they will all be taken (restored and filled).
In the past ten years I have watched Detroit go from a desolate ghost town to one of my favorite cities. (Boston still tops it, not many others).
BTW in addition to NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB., they are adding a professional soccer stadium assuming they can get a franchise.
For the political obsessives, Michigan switches between Dem and Rep governors. Policies change, not much else. Lots of accusations and name calling. It does nto make all that much difference who is in Lansing. The Detroit metro economy is going to do what it is going to do. The governor can have very minor influence on the well being of the State as a whole (not much), but the governor has not had much to do with the City for a long time. The City does not like outsiders messing in their affairs. The financial manager from out of State made them crazy. Now they are doing well and paid off the remaining debt years early.
Detroit's problem is not the party in charge but the individuals and their cronies. For decades, going back before the fall of the city, graft and corruption were ingrained into the city government from the street sweeper to the Mayor. It became so mired in corruption the city government became unable to function. Nothing was getting done. No snow removal, no trash pick up, no repairs or maintenance, the City had its own power supply but it was so old and ill maintained it had a tendency to catch fire. Police emergency response time was more than an hour in some areas. I called 911 once and they simply did not answer.
I lost count of the number of people who went to prison in the graft/corruption fall out over the past ten years. The current mayor is a democrat but fiscally conservative. He shocked everyone by getting elected while still white, but he is pretty widely accepted by both parties and has accomplished a lot. It looks like more than he really did because the City has continued improving like you would not believe. He has done a lot though. One of the biggest changes was going from almost all the street lights broken to the first fully LED city and all of them working. It is amazing what a difference working street lights make. Pretty much every neighborhood has garbage pick up now. They used to go months at times with no pick up in some areas. Trash, abandoned buildings, foundations are being removed pretty quickly although there are thousands of them. A lot of the overgrown fields that used to be neighborhoods at least get mowed once in a while. That is all mostly the City government's doing. The more amazing improvements have bene in the downtown mid-town and now stadium district areas. The only thing the mayors office did for that really was to get the city out of the way. It had been an insurmountable obstacle for many developers and dreamers before. Now the City is almost cooperative. Duggan has been a great mayor and will likely run for governor eventually. I am a moderate conservative republican. I would vote for him (depending on whom he was running against).
Those same houses are $90,000 now unless you get out to the neighborhoods that are still emptying out. Not too many of those and the $4,000 houses are tear downs. However if you have a house next to an empty lot that the city owns, the city will sell you that lot for $500. That is a nice perk.
To be sure, I was referring exactly to those parts of the city, off the beaten path so to speak. I didn't intend to suggest you could buy a house in Midtown for $4K.
If what you are implying is true, people should be flocking to places like Oklahoma City and Jacksonville FL (the most right-wing, Trump supporting cities in the country) yet they aren't.
Exactly.
And, please explain, OP, why no major city in Canada, Australia, or Western Europe -- all with governments far more liberal than any government in the state of Michigan -- look NOTHING like Detroit.
Last edited by newdixiegirl; 04-05-2018 at 01:55 PM..
I always love to see the conservatives from New York City, LA, and Seattle come on this forum and belch how miserable Democratic controlled cities are. They always make me laugh, knowing full well none of them are going to be moving to Tulsa or Birmingham or any other other red state, conservative city.
Bingo! Including Trump. Notice how he keeps his digs in NYC, among all those horrible NYC liberal elites? Notice how he received the education he always brags about at an elite institution in the liberal NE - those very same institutions his supporters denigrate as establishments of liberal brainwashing? Why doesn't Trump want to live among his peeps in Benton, AK or Fort Worth?
Last edited by newdixiegirl; 04-05-2018 at 01:56 PM..
While I agree with the majority of your post, I disagree with Detroit being where it was due to the effects of WWII. I'm so tired of hearing that excuse for why not only certain cities but the US was so prosperous in that time. Yes, it was a factor but Detroit was prosperous long before that.
Ship building
Steel works
Locomotive rail cars
Cast iron Stoves
When I say they had the good times in te 50s and 60s, I meant the lack of competition took an already industrial epicenter and made it like the jewel city of the Midwest. That super good time to be Detroit rotted the brains of the politicians, the unions, and everyone involved. But it was all primarily wrapped up in building cars or building the stuff used to build cars.
Wartime industrialization demand spikes helped as well, and that all drew down starting in the late 50s.
The reason it affected Detroit so badly is because their local government stuck their head in the sand and played tax 'n' spend, blame the state/nation/American_consumer game for the next 50 years. They chased their upper and middle classes out of the city, and wit the decline in overall tax revenue and the more austere stance of the corporate partner based on stiffer competition and slimmer margins, they didn't have the golden goose to keep laying eggs at the demanded rate.
It wasn't one thing that built them up or tore them down, it was decades of little things and just always passing the buck instead of doing anything tough even once...until the lat 10 or so years forced them to. Raise taxes has been a city council go-to move in towns all over America whenever they start losing revenue, Detroit is just a bigger example of it.
Also, a very big thing that happened in the mid/late 50s was the Interstate Highway Act and the resulting ease of suburbanization. Lower your costs, improve your lot in life and only add 20 minutes to your commute? Yes please. That's a problem every large city has dealt with in the last 50-60 years, some just deal with it better than others, but Rustbelt cities all got hit hard by suburbanization. Detroit simply handled it more poorly than many other cities.
Again, it is a lot of things, over time, that cascaded into the 2013 thing. But economic and cultural geography shifts. It always has, it always will. For every Detroit on the downside, there is a Charlotte NC on the upside. People, businesses and supply/demand move around. Detroit isn't the fault of one person, one party, one business, etc. Lots of variables, all relatively equal in degree.
The effort in this thread to pin "Detroit" on the GOP or conservatives is desperate and hilarious.
Seattle and other thriving cities should learn from this, but when one of our councilwomen says she wants to "go to war" with the cities primary economic producers, it doesn't give me much hope.
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