Even the dead are fleeing Detroit

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It becomes a cycle

Exactly. Detriot is the most perfect example of such a cycle pretty much anywhere.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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

Not wanting to live in a collapsing hellhole is "selfish"? At some point (I don't know when. Maybe Ernest does) Detriot hit a tipping point whereafter nothing the city itself could do could save it. As I've said before a classic cycle of collapse.
Be honest now, would you rather live in inner Detriot or a suburb?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Isn't that museum actually in Dearborn?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'm I the only one who finds Danwxman's claim that the car destroyed Detriot amusingly ironic?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Remember streetcars?  Los Angeles was once blanketed by Pacific Electric, which got replaced by freeways.  The streetcars were more efficient and did not pollute nearly as much.  Perhaps they were jsut ahead of their time, since cities across the US are starting to build or have built light-rail systems.  Portland, Ore. and Baltimore have light rail, and Tampa, and Dallas have started light-rail systems.  I hear Detroit has an idea for a system as well.  It could help reinvigorate downtown.

Pretty much all U.S cities used to have good public transport systems (early suburbanisation, especially in L.A, was actually driven by public transport. Population centres in that area generally follow the areas where the old Pacific Electric lines ran. Horrible irony; the L.A Freeways were built to try to bring business and population back to the city centre... boy did that backfire) but a conglomorate of car, oil and rubber companies (including General Motors) illegal bought up all the streetcar etc. lines and turned them into bus routes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Gentrified areas don't represent most of a city

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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

True but more losers than winners and more costs than benefits

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True. And what do most people in inner city areas do? Rent.

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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.

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That sort of gentrification pisses me off a lot

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Good point

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Gentrification can be controlled if it isn't encouraged by local government. It almost always is...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

The people are only ever the problem because the environment that they grew up in and live in is so bad (a lot of people make their own problems worse but then they really *don't* know any better in a lot of cases). Dumping them somewhere else exports the problem rather than deals with it. It's all cycles and stuff really.

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Let's use another phrase; "slum clearances*". Flattening every f***ing tower block in the Bronx would be an example; if you make people grow up in things like that, most of them will not be brilliant human beings.

*And yes, it's well known that clearing out and demolishing the slums does work up to a point

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Maybe actually trying to do something about the drug problem and why there is a drug problem would be a start? Not that that's going to happen

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No that isn't true. How exactly does that help matters? The problem just ends up moving around rather than getting fixed.

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Where to? Gas chambers? They are people too, no matter how messed up and unpleasent they often are.

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Yes, but the question should be why are they like that? Bring those same people up in a different environment and 9 times out of 10 they won't be anything like that. It's just silly to assume otherwise.

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Understandably so.

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No, I think I do

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Hmm... however tempting it is to jail the people that built the Projects, destroyed the economies of inner city areas, yadda, yadda, yadda it's not going to happen.

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And those people are not going to change if they are just dumped someplace else (and even further away from services) and likely get messed up even more in the process, are they?
The causes of the problem of inner city decline and ghettoisation do need to be solved, but there is no political will to do so at the moment (because it can't be solved by token "reforms" or soundbites).

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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.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Very true

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I don't know whether that's the goal... but it has often worked out that way. Certainly the implimention of such policies by certain race-baiting crooked scumbags do seem to have that as the goal...

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Best thing to do with welfare is to scrap it and work out a new system that doesn't perpetuate poverty, doesn't reek of stigma (actually this is a serious problem with the current system. People on welfare currently have no self respect because being on welfare sort of makes them (and others) feel that they are A Leech On Society, which means they don't have any self respect (and often no respect for others either) and this leads to all kinds of problems like drug abuse and anti-social behavior. Stigma like that might be one of the major causes of the current problems. Funny that liberal groups and the sort of scumbag local politician you get in those areas don't seem to want to get rid of that stigma isn't it?)

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Serious question; what's the funding like for an average public school in a run down part of (say) New York and what is the money spent on?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

That the difference occurs early on

Do you think slum clearance has ever taken place with the intention to create more slums?

Oh yes. But out of the way and less obviously slum looking.

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I'm tempted to say that would be an improvement

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),

Well it does vary from place to place

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True. Most of the time the people that devise such policies don't know much about the areas they inflict with it

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Highlighted the very important bit

What if it's a luxury high-rise?

Should have specified; high rise public housing

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Ah, but the arguement of those studies is that for some reason (and they disagree why) living in highrises makes people more likely to be complete bastards and ruin everyone elses lives. More research should be done into that actually.

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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

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True most of the time. Which is why it's very important to make them interested in education.