Even the dead are fleeing Detroit

[dazzleman]

Detriot is the most perfect and most extreme example of a spiral of collapse brought on by a collapsing tax base.
It's f***ed on it's own.

I blame white flight and the race riots, as well as a very corrupt city government.

It's interesting you mention white flight and race riots in the same sentence.  Why do you think whites fled?

People like to blame all these things on "racism."  Would racism alone motivate people to move dead bodies?  People have legitimate reasons not to want anything to do with Detroit, or some of the people who live there.

The fact is that Detroit is a horrible place to live or even visit.  It offers nothing.  At least some of the blame for that has to be laid at the feet of the people who live there, and who make it that way.  If enough Detroit residents decided to make it better, it would be better.

If you blame white flight, you're saying that a city can't be good without being mostly white.  While that is sometimes true in practice, to assert it in theory is racist in its own way.  In theory, it shouldn't matter whether the residents are white or black, but you're saying it does, and that the fact that the residents are mostly black is what is making Detroit bad.  Liberals often do this, even while condemning "racism" (usually from their comfortable suburban homes).

Much of the blame for this belongs to liberal urban and social policies.  Liberal urban and social policies, the highlights of which are high taxes, forced busing, tolerance for criminal activity, especially by blacks, and subsidization and encouragement of substandard family structure through criminally stupid welfare policies, made many of our cities unlivable, to one degree or another, by the early 1970s.  Anybody who had a choice left, including many blacks.  There was absolutely no reason to stay living in cities under these circumstances, especially when even the better neighborhoods were not allowed to have decent schools.

Some cities did better than others.  Cities like New York, having major corporate presence, didn't totally lose their tax base, and fared better than cities like Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, etc.

It's a very sad story.

[dazzleman]

It's interesting you mention white flight and race riots in the same sentence.  Why do you think whites fled?

People like to blame all these things on "racism."  Would racism alone motivate people to move dead bodies?  People have legitimate reasons not to want anything to do with Detroit, or some of the people who live there.

The fact is that Detroit is a horrible place to live or even visit.  It offers nothing.  At least some of the blame for that has to be laid at the feet of the people who live there, and who make it that way.  If enough Detroit residents decided to make it better, it would be better.

If you blame white flight, you're saying that a city can't be good without being mostly white.  While that is sometimes true in practice, to assert it in theory is racist in its own way.  In theory, it shouldn't matter whether the residents are white or black, but you're saying it does, and that the fact that the residents are mostly black is what is making Detroit bad.  Liberals often do this, even while condemning "racism" (usually from their comfortable suburban homes).

Much of the blame for this belongs to liberal urban and social policies.  Liberal urban and social policies, the highlights of which are high taxes, forced busing, tolerance for criminal activity, especially by blacks, and subsidization and encouragement of substandard family structure through criminally stupid welfare policies, made many of our cities unlivable, to one degree or another, by the early 1970s.  Anybody who had a choice left, including many blacks.  There was absolutely no reason to stay living in cities under these circumstances, especially when even the better neighborhoods were not allowed to have decent schools.

Some cities did better than others.  Cities like New York, having major corporate presence, didn't totally lose their tax base, and fared better than cities like Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, etc.

It's a very sad story.

I agree. Nice post.

thanks dude

[dazzleman]

I didn't mean for my post to be interpreted as racist.  But one must admit that white flight has been a cause for the deterioration of the American inner city in the last forty years, which in turn stemmed from race riots and the growing development of suburbia.  Good post and analysis though.

I know you didn't intend for it to be racist.  I'm just trying to get people to think outside the box.  So much of our thinking on urban and racial issues is programmed according to a preset formula, and that formula has failed.  I like to try to get people to look at thing from a different angle in the hope that we'll find more success that way.

[dazzleman]

Actually, the suburbs of Detroit are horrible as well.

Location:     Harrisburg, PA

Thanks for the input

Selfishness of the suburbanites has destroyed Detroit...anybody can see that.

I really don't agree.  The social dysfunction of a large segment of Detroit's population, coupled with the liberal notion that others in the city should suffer the consequences of that dysfunction even if they did not share it, drove the functional population out of Detroit.

It is not selfishness but self-preservation.  It is no more selfish than removing a part of your body that has cancer so that the rest of the body can survive.  There's no way anybody with a choice should stay in such a living hell.  The people who engage in the type of behavior that make Detroit a living hell are squarely to blame for the problems, not "selfish" suburbanites who only want to live a decent life, and aren't doing any harm to anybody.

[dazzleman]

Actually, the suburbs of Detroit are horrible as well.

Location:     Harrisburg, PA

Thanks for the input

Selfishness of the suburbanites has destroyed Detroit...anybody can see that.

I think he's joking.

It could be, but there are some people who actually believe that, and I though danwxman might be one of them, based on some of his other opinions.

Now, if someone like StatesRights said it, I'd know for sure he wasn't serious...

[dazzleman]

What drove out the functional part of Detroit? Well, they quite literally drove out. The car destroyed Detroit, much worse so then many other cities. A lot of the blame lies with the FEDERAL highway system. Look at some pictures of cities before and after the highways were built. The middle class didn't have to leave Detroit in the 50's and 60's...but the culture of the time taught them that they did.

I disagree that suburbanites aren't doing any harm...they are. I view it with a sense of responsibility. Is it really responsible to drive an SUV around a plush suburb where you will never need to go off-road and drive 50 miles to work (as many now do)? Is it really responsible to relocate your business out of downtown and into a sprawly office park on top of some wetland?

The worst traffic in this country isn't in the cities anymore...it's in the suburbs. They are ruining our country and our environment.

But I understand we have freedom in this country. I just wish people, and politicans, would have more responsibility. I don't know how to fix Detroit, but the first thing I would do is create a functional public transportation system, possibly with light or heavy rail. But the damage has already been done to Southeast Michigan and I don't know if it can be repaired.

Dazzleman, I don't know if you live in an area that is seeing an explosion in suburban growth...but if you did...you would see how many problems it creates. You blamed liberal policies...but I blame conservative "pro-growth" policies for destroying much of the beautiful countryside in my area.

You're really talking about a different issue here.  You're criticizing suburban areas in general, not just blaming them for destroying cities because they have some vague responsibility to stay and endure muggings, murders, high taxes, etc.

I don't disagree with you about the problem of overdevelopment.  I live in a very nice but fully developed suburban area.  I don't drive a big SUV because I agree with you that's it's an irresponsible waste to drive a car like that when you don't need to.  We have terrible traffic problems, but overall it's a great area.

I don't have an answer to the problem of overdevelpment, other than to reduce or eliminate population growth.  Economically, we can't afford to do that because our economy is a pyramid that depends on each succeeding generation being larger than the one before it.  If that doesn't hold true, we'd have major economic problems.

I think the cities are going to come back at some point.  The big stumbling block to the cities coming back is education.  In my state, there is a well-intentioned but idiotic racial balancing law, which says that within a school district (itself an arbitrary construct), there must be relatively even distribution of "minorities," which are defined basically as anybody a shade darker than I am, and I'm pretty light.  Aside from the practical and moral problems involved with categorizing everybody by ethnicity and race, which we really should be getting away from, this takes away from any district with a multi-racial population the ability to have neighborhood schools, and effectively requires that kids from good neighborhoods go to school in violent neighborhoods on the other side of town.

The result of this law is that the middle class fled the cities, and fled any area with a multi-racial population.  This decimated the cities, and created a supply and demand situation whereby the lily white suburbs have very high housing prices and the cities are much cheaper because nobody wants them.  The end result is that racial separation is more deeply entrenched than before the law was passed.  If this law were repealed and enclaves with good schools could be formed in cities, it would be a huge boost to urban development.  Of course, that will never happen.

There has been a sort of partial answer to the problem if you look at the lot sizes for new houses that are being built.  Back in the 1950s or so, the houses were built with very large lot sizes, but today, because land costs are so high, houses are being built with very small lot sizes.  This creates something closer to an urban density, which ultimately uses less land for the same amount of people.

I think you're more or less right about overdevelopment, but wrong to blame suburbanites for all these problems.  The fact is that cities in their current state are largely unlivable for those with kids who want to give them a proper education and upbringing, and they have no choice but to go to the suburbs.  If we change the range of choices, some or many may choose more urban living that takes up less space.

[dazzleman]

The fact is that Detroit is a horrible place to live or even visit.

There are plenty of interesting places to visit in Detroit, including (but not limited to) the Henry Ford Museum, which houses hundreds of important items in American history - like the chair Lincoln was shot in - and Greenfield Village, which takes visitors on a tour through Detroit's history of car manufacturing. Downtown is relatively safe. You can find some of the best restaurants in the country, especially if you're fond of Chinese and Thai. The Cranbrook Institute of Science is one of the most fascinating places in the entire world.

You are ill-informed.

Well, maybe I went a bit too far.  I believe you if you say there are interesting things to visit there.  I stand corrected.

But I still think, based upon what I've heard, that it is a hell on earth in which to live.

[dazzleman]

It is a terrible place to live. I'd rather live in the Bronx. However, contrary to whatever bullshit danwxman is currently spitting out, the suburbs are wonderful; best quality of life in the midwest, maybe.

Four of America's safest cities are in Southeast Michigan

The Bronx sucks, but I'd rather live there too than Detroit.

Danwxman is not totally wrong, but he's really only looking at one side of the ledger, in my opinion.  His opinions are a little too absolute, and condemnatory of those who are just looking for a decent life.  I wonder why he doesn't condemn the residents of Detroit whose horrific behavior has made the city a hell on earth.  If they behaved differently, the suburbanites may have no problem moving into the city.

[dazzleman]

I hope you're right that the cities will come back at some point, but I'm not sure why you believe that. Living conditions in almost every American city have been worsening for decades. Detroit peaked at nearly 2 million... in 1950?

Living conditions in cities worsened considerably in the second half of the twentieth century, for a variety of reasons.

But I think that everything is cyclical, and the cities will come back at some point.  There are certain advantages to urban living, especially with gasoline at $3 a gallon and headed higher.

I have no idea when that might happen.  It is already happening to some extent in some cities.   Generally, it happens with young professionals without kids, older people whose kids are grown, or people wealthy enough to pay for private schools.  The big stumbling block for the cities is that they can't have good schools under current social conditions, and under current political conditions, it's not really permissible to isolate the dysfunctional element.  This make the whole system bad, and keeps families out of the cities.

[dazzleman]

I hope you're right that the cities will come back at some point, but I'm not sure why you believe that. Living conditions in almost every American city have been worsening for decades. Detroit peaked at nearly 2 million... in 1950?

Not true. I would say the majority of American cities are becoming more liveable. Look at Philadelphia and Baltimore as prime examples. Both cities have a long way to go, but the residential market is booming.

Then explain "white flight."

I already did. White flight doesn't exist in the cities anymore, it's black flight.

Whites are going back in and gentrifying certain neighborhoods.  As a result, the neighborhoods become more expensive, driving out longer-term residents of limited economic means who didn't own their homes, and can't afford the increased rents.

Is that what you mean by black flight?

[dazzleman]

Gentrification is definitely a great thing.

No, no it isn't. It just pushes the problem of inner city poverty further out; if anything it can make the problem worse as the displaced population is further away from services than they were before. It can also create a lot of serious other problems and almost always makes whatever tensions the area has (race, religion, class etc) worse.

I think it's more fair to say that gentrification has its benefits and costs, and produces winners and losers.

If a person owned his home in a run-down neighborhood, gentrification can help him make a killing on it, even if it is a run-down shack.  On the other hand, gentrification is a terrible thing for renters, because it prices them out of the neighborhood in which they have lived, unless there are some controls on their rent (and I don't believe in rent control).

On the other hand, gentrification has made large improvements to neighborhoods that were previously slums overtaken with crime.  I find it hard to argue that neighborhoods that are like that should stay that way.

I'm not saying that every neighborhood overtaken by gentrification was previously a crime-ridden slum.  Some were simply unfashionable working class neighborhoods that suddenly became "hot" because of their location.

So I don't think gentrification is either all good or all bad.  To some, the way in which in happens, and how extreme it is, determines whether it leans good or bad.  It does lay bare the problem of affordable housing in some reasonable proximity to urban areas for people who are on moderate incomes.  This is a serious problem that we haven't really been able to solve.  This issue is one reason I encourage people of moderate means to own their own homes, even if they are modest homes.  Ownership gives a person a certain level of control that they never had as a renter.

In the end, it matters not whether gentrification is good or bad, because it really can't be controlled and will happen anyway.  Even if we deem it to be a good thing, we have to find a good way to cope with the negative side effects of it on certain segments of the population.

[dazzleman]

That's the excuseable sort of gentrification... if the poor bastards stuck in the slum don't just end up living in a similer sort of dump but further away from services.
Personally I prefer regeneration in those areas to gentrification anyway; gentrification only ever deals with pockets in such areas. The problems remain unsolved.

It's true that improving one neighborhood often means moving the problem to another neighborhood.  That occurs in cases where the people are the problem, and in chronically bad neighborhoods, the people are often the problem.

I don't know what you mean by "regeneration," but if a neighborhood is dominated by crack-addicted welfare mothers, it isn't going to improve as long as people like that live there in certain numbers.  The only way to improve the neighborhood is to bring in better people; there's no way around it.  And this means displacing the trash that was there previously.

Of course, I don't mean to imply that gentrifying neighborhoods were previously inhabited solely by "trash" but it's unrealistic not to acknowledge that certain neighborhoods are largely inhabited by people who are very trashy, and in close proximity to whom decent people don't want to live.  You don't seem to acknowledge this reality in your post.  The problems remain unsolved because the people that are causing the problems continue to cause them, and the only way to solve this type of problem is to isolate people like that to areas where they can do the least damage.  Many of these people are not going to change, and for the problems that you are talking about to be solved, people have to change.  It's not about buildings or external stimulus; the problem is internal with people like this.

[dazzleman]

As a primary cause? Rubbish. Hey here's an experiment, let's take 100 babies who would have grown up in some inner city f*** hole and swap them with 100 babies that would have grown up in a nice suburb somewhere. Let's see what happens.

The problem with your little example is that with the parents these babies have, the place they live in couldn't possibly be a nice suburb.

I know what you are saying, but still, the people are the problem.  You take inner city people and put them somewhere else, and they will simply recreate the conditions they had before.  A nice suburb wouldn't stay nice for very long with these types of people living in them.

Now, if you're going to argue that these kids would be better off removed from the custody of these awful parents, and put with DIFFERENT PARENTS in a nice suburb, then I'd agree with you.

I don't agree with you that slum clearance works.  It only brings more slums, because people create slums.  The awful projects in the Bronx were brought about by slum clearance of previous tenement buildings.  Those buildings were considered awful, so they were knocked down, and "higher quality housing" (the projects) were built in their place.  Well, the people destroyed the projects.  I agree that the projects were very poorly conceived, but I think these people will destroy whatever they are given.

The key is to minimize this segment of the population, by a number of means.  Liberal policies seemed to have as their goal the maximization of the dysfunctional, deficit portion of the population.  Our welfare policies have encouraged irresponsible child-bearing, and that has to stop, though welfare reform was a big step in that direction. 

I support making available alternatives to failing public schools to allow those in urban areas who are interested in their children's education to escape bad schools, and provide their children an education.  Liberals oppose this, of course, but the first step is to provide an escape hatch to people living in these awful areas, if they choose to avail themselves of it.

[dazzleman]

You seem to have misinterpreted me; the idea was to just take 100 babies who would have lived in some inner city f*** hole and swap them with babies would would have lived in some nice suburb and see how both sets grow up etc. Obviously such an experiment won't ever happen because snatching someone's baby for a social experiment is a horrific thing to do, but what the end result would be seems fairly obvious.

But what's your point?  That environment matters?  We know that, but the issue is who creates the environment.  My argument is that people, not buildings, create the environment.  The poor quality of the buildings in slum areas results from the people who live there.

It does if the people cleared out of the slums aren't given new slums to live in... which is the problem because (as I've said before) there doesn't seem to be any political will to do otherwise.

Do you think slum clearance has ever taken place with the intention to create more slums?  The problem is that the people turn whatever they are given and turn it into a slum.  If you gave them a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, they'd turn it into a slum.

Only a small but VERY visable minority. Why punish the majority? Here's an idea; tie living in a new house to trying to get a job if possible. And tie misbehavior to withdrawal of certain services with the promise of giving them back if the misbehavior stops. The final punishment would be eviction.

Although I don't agree with you that it's a very small minority causing the problem (I think it's a much larger minority, or even a majority in some cases), you make a good point.  Liberal social policy has forced people in these situations to the lowest common denominator by not setting any penalties for bad behavior, and in fact rewarding it.  And people who are unable to buy their way out of it are forced to endure it, and brought as low as those that surround them.  This is essentially the same argument I make in support an escape hatch from public schools in these areas.  But liberals vociferously oppose this.  Until liberals stop blocking potential solutions that have not been tried, rather than advocating what they have forced down our throats which has FAILED MISERABLY, they can't expect the rest of us to be willing to listen to them.

Basically they made people swap living in slum type I for living in slum type II... I've said it before and I'll say it again; U.S urban policy has been an immense failure.

I certainly agree that urban policy has been an immense failure.  And I think most housing projects, especially those in big cities, are very ill-conceived.  But a big part of the problem was the administration of these projects, not just the buildings.  When any type of horrible behavior in the projects received protected status from the liberals because the poor are by definition victims who can't be held responsible for their bad behavior, the projects were doomed.  Even if they weren't dreadful high-rise buildings, the results would be the same.  There are projects in the city next to mine, that are nice, garden style places.  No big high rises.  Still, they are horrible, infested with drugs and violence.  With different people living there, they could be quite nice.  The root of the problem is the people and the way we have chosen to deal with these types of people, not the buildings, bad as many of those projects are.

True but then how can you expect people to live in those things? There's been some very interesting studies indicating that there is a *very* strong link between living in high rise buildings and anti-social behavior. Quite scary really.

What if it's a luxury high-rise?  I don't personally like high-rise living, and I agree the projects are horribly designed.  But high-rise doesn't have to be bad, if you don't have "neighbors" who keep vandalizing the elevators, urinating in the hallways, shooting up drugs in the lobby, etc.  Again, the primary problem is the people.  Living any place with those types of people would be hell on earth, highrise or not.

I agree with much of the rest of what you said.

In response to your question, I will use Connecticut as an example, since I know it better than New York at this point.

Hartford, a typical poor district loaded with kids from dysfunctional homes where the parents are not interested in education for their kids, spends more than the town of Greenwich, one of the wealthiest towns in the state, per student on education.  This is due to massive state subsidies to poor districts.  I can't give you a breakdown on how it's spent, but I think it's fair to say the district is not being shortchanged for funding.

Still, the results are horrible.  Where parents aren't interested in education, you will not have good schools, no matter how much money is spent.  It's really that simple.

[dazzleman]

I have a sneaking suspicision that a very high amount will be wasted on administration/graft/etc... rather than on things like up to date books. That's usually the way with education funding sadly

I'm sure you're right, but the problem is that while this type of thing would not be tolerated in a suburban area where parents are interested in education, it is tolerated in urban areas because nobody really cares.

I would love to get more parents interested in their children's education, and if you have any ideas to do that, I'd love to hear it.  It is very hard to change what people are interested in, and what they value.  And education is not valued in urban areas.

I'm not trying to be disagreeable, but I get sick and tired of the implication from standard liberals (which you clearly are not) that people like me are to blame for the situation, simply because we seek to isolate ourselves from the effects of this situation.  And the best part is, these liberals are hypocrites because most of them are just as isolated from it as I am.