Is Detroit fixable? How would you fix it?

[TJ in Oregon]

Urban farming is actually a wonderful thing. It helps to provide impoverished families with the ability to support themselves and obtain access to higher quality foods than they would otherwise get. It's not ideal but better than leaving vacant land sit vacant. I'll admit here I'm thinking more in Cleveland terms than in Detroit terms and we've torn down far fewer buildings. We have a different strategy in this city that isn't about just flattening everything. We certainly do tear some down, but not nearly to the extent of Detroit.

The real key is to spur development in places. You can do that by targeting areas that have a fighting chance of being desireable in the near future. Cleveland has the University Circle and Euclid Corridor areas that have each experienced a ton of development in recent years, not because they were chosen at random but because they have assets that make them desireable.

Corruption is a huge problem in many governments. When you have an impoverished area, having competent leadership makes a world of difference. I'm calling it right now, in 5 years we'll be reading about how much East Cleveland has improved and developed. Why? Because for the first time in my life they have a competent mayor. Previous regimes have left millions of dollars of federal and state money on the table because of sheer incompetence. When you are a poor city that lost 34% of its residents in the last 10 years, you just can't afford that type of thing. But, putting the right person in charge makes a world of difference.

[TJ in Oregon]

The problem with legalizing drugs (even if it were otherwise possible to do in one city) is that by legalizing them you send the message to at-risk youth that drug use is acceptable. Part of trying to fix an area is getting young people to make good life decisions and encouraging drug use is something that is not going to increase their chances of succeeding in college and integrating into larger society. Sure you could save a couple bucks by targeting police enforcement elsewhere, but does anyone really think the violent drug dealers and kingpins in a highly impoverished area like Detroit will become model citizens once you legalize drugs and build a junkie centers? The drugs are a means not an end for many. Most of the people on here are probably suburban white kids who support drug legalization because they have enough financial support that if they screw up their life, they’ll end up getting bailed out by family or end up in a rehab center. If I mess things up, I think my parents would intervene before I end up living under a bridge somewhere. The urban poor don’t have the resources to make poor decisions and escape poverty. By legalizing drugs, you might think you’re helping them, but you’re not; you’re indenturing them.

The real way you fix a city is through development. You need to have some ideas to create growth and employ more people. Detroit needs to get companies to blossom from within and keep young educated individuals around. If you can do that much, the rest will slowly follow because those jobs will rely on lower income, unskilled labor to make the high-level jobs meaningful. You might not get everyone on a huge income right away but you have to start somewhere. The best way to get people off the streets is to get them jobs. Yet, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Some people will fall back to the streets and into their addictions. That’s part of life. But every job you do create is another person who can help support himself.

Cleveland is showing some incredible signs of hope right now on these fronts. About ten years ago, someone pointed out that despite millions of dollars’ worth of research, patents, and discoveries at Case, none of it was making the leap to entrepreneurial development. So, the state of Ohio, through the Third Frontier Program joined with Case, the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and the VA Hospital to form BioEnterprise, a not-for-profit company whose entire purpose is to take research breakthroughs and act as an incubator for small start-up companies. Over the last ten years they’ve helped to build over 200 small companies in the greater Cleveland area. Not only that, they’ve also managed to get about half the companies to locate themselves along a two mile stretch of Euclid Avenue, formerly a decaying abandoned thoroughfare that was originally the home of Cleveland’s Millionaires Row (all that’s left of it now is a few broken down tenement houses).

The city of Cleveland proper has benefitted from a government that for the last decade has spent very little money on anything they didn’t have. We have a budget surplus, believe it or not. Our mayor might not be an incredibly popular figure, heck he can barely speak English, yet he is very good at finding ways to make ends meet.

On the other hand, East Cleveland (a “suburb” that’s worse than most of the city itself) is in a different budgetary situation because it’s lost 34% of its population in the last ten years and the previous two mayors had ‘issues’ to say the least. They finally new, dynamic mayor who has a vision for fixing that city. East Cleveland looks a little like how you would expect a rich suburb to look in an apocalypse movie. It’s full of Victorian era mansions now in disrepair. One random backstreet even has Roman columns and archways along it. John D. Rockefeller lived in East Cleveland. It has an incredible amount of potential, the world headquarters of GE Lighting, Rockefeller’s estate, close proximity to University Circle and Little Italy, and a Level 1 Trauma Center in Huron Hospital. Yet, it’s in disarray. I think it’s very salvageable because it has so many valuable assets.

Anyways, I think the key to fixing these places is to project strong, competent leadership and use common sense in maximizing the value of every asset you have available. Focus on areas that have the most potential first and branch out from there. Don’t waste valuable resources on stupid pet projects and fire people who do. It took the FBI to wake up the people of Cuyahoga County to some of the things our former leaders were doing off of public resources and we have learned quite a bit. Many of the people we once entrusted to run this town are in prison—where they belong. It’s not about Democrats and Republicans, it’s about competent leadership.

[TJ in Oregon]

The problem with legalizing drugs (even if it were otherwise possible to do in one city) is that by legalizing them you send the message to at-risk youth that drug use is acceptable. Part of trying to fix an area is getting young people to make good life decisions and encouraging drug use is something that is not going to increase their chances of succeeding in college and integrating into larger society. Sure you could save a couple bucks by targeting police enforcement elsewhere, but does anyone really think the violent drug dealers and kingpins in a highly impoverished area like Detroit will become model citizens once you legalize drugs and build a junkie centers? The drugs are a means not an end for many. Most of the people on here are probably suburban white kids who support drug legalization because they have enough financial support that if they screw up their life, they’ll end up getting bailed out by family or end up in a rehab center. If I mess things up, I think my parents would intervene before I end up living under a bridge somewhere. The urban poor don’t have the resources to make poor decisions and escape poverty. By legalizing drugs, you might think you’re helping them, but you’re not; you’re indenturing them.

It's not really about help for me, although I think you'd be interested in seeing the statistics for things like heroin abuse in Switzerland (heroin use in general went way down with supervised injection rooms and the general perception among researchers was that it was less attractive to the population now), Portugal, Spain and other areas that have decriminalized/medicalized it - or the massive decline in HIV in New Haven (70%!) where needle exchange programs have been in place for many years now.I personally am uncomfortable with the idea of things like public welfare as it is on practical and ethical grounds never mind "harm reduction" policies, but if there's research backing it up I'm not going to personally discount it.

Now with that said, that's not totally what this is about. Mostly, it's just about resources. Detroit very obviously doesn't have the money to aggressively enforce federal law for things like Marijuana when they're already looking into 10% wage cuts and closing down things left and right. The money is barely there to deal with the violent drug dealers you mentioned, let alone some college kid toking up or looking to make some extra off-the table money to fund his habit. Also, just because something is legal (or passively tolerated by law enforcement) doesn't mean there won't be a stigma. Hell, I can tell you from experience that this country places enormous stigmas on the disabled or those with certain medical conditions and those are certainly not personal decisions, unlike drug use.

The Swiss study nonwithstanding (and unfortunately I do not have access to the journal it’s in to actually read it), I am still skeptical of the idea that the use of a substance decreases once it’s legalized. For example, I suspect that legalizing medical marijuana has not reduced its usage in California. I also question our ability to accurately determine the usage of a substance before legalization. As illogical as it is, I think harm reduction policies in sort of a Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell way are preferable to outright legalization because it still provides police with the ability to enforce drug laws when convenient. I have a serious problem with the government actually supplying street drugs because that’s something I don’t believe we should have to subsidize. Heck if we did, then we would probably pour millions of dollars into trying to convince kids not to use the same drugs we’re supplying.

The police are going to enforce all of these laws only when convenient. That’s not ideal but it’s the reality. The Detroit police probably shouldn’t be spending a ton of money to enforce marijuana laws in general, although I do think they should make a greater effort to enforce them among youth than among the adult population. No one ever enforces drug laws on college campuses anyway so that’s not saying much. There is some value in having those laws on the books even if the police aren’t actively seeking to enforce them.

But if our goal is to fix Detroit, we need to find some way of dealing with the people living there. A city is not just a collection of buildings, but more importantly the people living in them. The goal should be to make as many people in such impoverished areas into productive citizens. If we just focus on mitigating some devastating effects of drug use while tolerating it, we fail to prepare people for entry into employment. In the end, we want people to have jobs and keep those jobs.

[TJ in Oregon]

That said those that are pointing out that the unused housing stock should bulldozed to the ground are not recommending anything that is good for the city. All of it should be sold and if that means that it is going to be sold for $1k each so be it because at least you'll have some people will have personal responsibility for that housing(and if they deem that the property is more valuable bulldozed they'll do it themselves).

I absolutely agree with you here. One thing to take into consideration is that demolition projects cost money; you can't simply go in with a bulldozer and begin shellacking houses left and right, certainly not under the present regulatory regime. I'd have no problem with the city purchasing abandoned houses and selling them at far below market value.

But this is part of the problem too: the only market for most of these buildings is absentee landlords or political cronies looking for a kickback. If you tried to sell them all, it would be difficult to find a buyer for any price. People aren't going to be lining up to purchase falling down houses stripped of copper wiring and plumbing in the middle of a crime-ridden neighborhood in inner-city Detroit. The land isn't worth the cost of tearing the houses down. Much of the unused housing stock, at least in Cleveland, already is for sale. Now, if you could circumvent some regulations and start tearing them down left and right, you could get something done. But a free market solution doesn't work if there are no buyers.

[TJ in Oregon]

I do find the incredible faith here in half-baked piecemeal boilerplate (whether partisan or the classic American delusion of 'good government' as a solution to anything) solutions to be quite sweet. Even if there is the crazy logic of a Khrushchev-era Soviet planner lurking (to your surprise, not doubt, as well as mine) lurking, surreally, in the background.

The notion that Detroit doesn't have an overabundance of dilapidated housing stock as well is absurd. They have an abundance of both. So in the future if Detroit ever halts its decline and starts growing again there will be cheap options in both well maintained property as well as a large quantity of even way cheaper fixer upper property. And if a lot of places get torn down to be replaced with apartment complexes, condos, or new homes that's fine too.

Detroit certainly has houses. It's just that no one in their right mind would ever want to live in one.

What is wrong with you? First your post about good governance and Khrushchev make no sense relative to my post.

Further more to make a blanket statement like the entire metro of Detroit doesn't have any homes worth living in just shows that your a very ignorant person living on the other side of the pond.

I'm not sure what he was going for with the Kruschchev part but I don't think he said (or meant) in the entire metro Detroit area. But, I doubt you'd find very many of the vacant homes in Detroit worth living in at the moment. You would need to invest a considerable amount of money to make them so.

Most of the land in the inner-cities is already very, very cheap. For example, in 2008, the median house sale price in East Cleveland was a whopping $20,000. In 2008 we had over 1,400 houses sold for less than $1000 in Cleveland and East Cleveland and 133 sold for $1.

There certainly are some houses worth saving—and people buy them and save them. But, the problem is not that the city is buying and demolishing too many houses. The city can’t keep up with the need to demolish them. If you have a desire to buy a cheap house and do something with it, go right ahead. You’ll find there aren’t many people in line.

[TJ in Oregon]

I do find the incredible faith here in half-baked piecemeal boilerplate (whether partisan or the classic American delusion of 'good government' as a solution to anything) solutions to be quite sweet. Even if there is the crazy logic of a Khrushchev-era Soviet planner lurking (to your surprise, not doubt, as well as mine) lurking, surreally, in the background.

The notion that Detroit doesn't have an overabundance of dilapidated housing stock as well is absurd. They have an abundance of both. So in the future if Detroit ever halts its decline and starts growing again there will be cheap options in both well maintained property as well as a large quantity of even way cheaper fixer upper property. And if a lot of places get torn down to be replaced with apartment complexes, condos, or new homes that's fine too.

Detroit certainly has houses. It's just that no one in their right mind would ever want to live in one.

What is wrong with you? First your post about good governance and Khrushchev make no sense relative to my post.

Further more to make a blanket statement like the entire metro of Detroit doesn't have any homes worth living in just shows that your a very ignorant person living on the other side of the pond.

I'm not sure what he was going for with the Kruschchev part but I don't think he said (or meant) in the entire metro Detroit area. But, I doubt you'd find very many of the vacant homes in Detroit worth living in at the moment. You would need to invest a considerable amount of money to make them so.

Most of the land in the inner-cities is already very, very cheap. For example, in 2008, the median house sale price in East Cleveland was a whopping $20,000. In 2008 we had over 1,400 houses sold for less than $1000 in Cleveland and East Cleveland and 133 sold for $1.

There certainly are some houses worth saving—and people buy them and save them. But, the problem is not that the city is buying and demolishing too many houses. The city can’t keep up with the need to demolish them. If you have a desire to buy a cheap house and do something with it, go right ahead. You’ll find there aren’t many people in line.

What's the point of demolishing them? Because they are an eye sour? That isn't a good enough reason to spend money demolishing property.

I bet the reason why you're seeing a lot of property not being able to sell is because the city is probably refusing to lower to the tax assessed value down to the sale price(its real value). So if I buy a house for $100 and its tax assessed value is $20k then the property taxes on the investment are the problem not the initial purchase price.

The point of tearing them down isn’t just to remove an eyesore. Abandoned houses breed crime by providing an ideal location for squatters, junkies, drug deals, etc. There have been studies that have shown crime rates are affected by the presence of broken down houses. Have you ever heard of Broken Windows Theory?

The property tax re-assessments might in theory be a good idea, and perhaps it could be done in Detroit, although it would not work in Cleveland because the public story line would immediately become that someone connected to public officials doing the purchasing (we’ve had plenty of scandals along these lines in recent years—our county government is a mess). The city has offered tax abatements in the past to those building houses in the city and there are a few pockets where this has been successful, but it has failed to reinvigorate most of the neighborhoods.

[TJ in Oregon]

Pittsburgh is inapposite largely, because it never had the degree of crime Detroit did and does, did not get its infrastructure gutted in riots driving out most businesses (Detroit has zero appliance stores in the city) and actually has many picturesque hilly neighborhoods that folks actually want to live in. It is also substantially white. The issue going forward, is will Cleveland end up more like Detroit or Pittsburgh.

The west side of Cleveland is like Pittsburgh in this regard and the east side is like Detroit. Most of the houses on the west side are occupied and liveable. Many, perhaps most even, of the east side looks like a post-apocalyptic movie. The Cuyahoga River acts as a buffer between neighborhoods, keeping the historical differences between the two still true.