Detroit's worse than I thought

[Capt Worley PE]

Will the last person out of Detroit please turn out the lights? oh, wait...the city's got it.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-24/half-of-detroit-s-streetlights-may-go-out-as-city-shrinks.html

 

[Krakosky]

Lol now you know why I want to escape.

 

[mudpuppy]

Downtown has actually improved since I was a kid, with the casinos, Ford Field and Comerica Park.

The rest of the city, not so much.

I had a friend that bought a house in one of the nicer neighborhoods of the city. Had a car set on fire in his front yard, fence ripped out of his back yard to steal his lawnmower, and house broken into and everything he owned was stolen.

 

[Krakosky]

^ Daaaaamn. That sucks.

 

[Capt Worley PE]

I hear the taxes were pretty high, too. I looked up one of those houses for sale for 20K and the taxes were listed at 6K/year. Don't know how accurate that was, though.

 

[snickerd3]

what are these things you call street lights?

If we want outdoor nighttime illumination we have to put up our own light. I think the downtown strip is the only place lit up at night.

 

[mudpuppy]

The millage rate is about 67, which is high, but not $6k on a $20k house. More like $670 (maybe they slipped a significant figure).

 

[EM_PS]

Yeah I heard Haiti was going to host a benefit concert for Detroit....

 

[Capt Worley PE]

The millage rate is about 67, which is high, but not $6k on a $20k house. More like $670 (maybe they slipped a significant figure).

What was throwing me is that apparently some really nice old homes are in bad hoods and selling for cheap. Couple that with the fact that I KNOW there tax info is wonked on local properties I actually know about, and you have confusion on the veracity of the info.

 

[mudpuppy]

Yes there are lots of absolutely beautiful houses in Detroit. Back in the 20s to 40s it was a really nice place. It's just not safe to live in most of them now.

 

[Krakosky]

Kwame followed me to TX when he left Detroit. He lived about 30 minutes away.

 

[mudpuppy]

LOL, did he send you texts too?

 

[Krakosky]

Nope. Too bad. Maybe I could've gotten an Escalade out of it.

 

[Capt Worley PE]

Yes there are lots of absolutely beautiful houses in Detroit. Back in the 20s to 40s it was a really nice place. It's just not safe to live in most of them now.

Shame, isn't it?

 

[mudpuppy]

It is. . . don't get me started. . . All the the infrastructure, the nice houses. . . Detroit has everything you need for a great city. But people don't want to live in the city, they want new houses and to live in suburbia so they keep moving farther out and developing the greenfields. When I was growing up, Hall Road, about 20 miles north of downtown Detroit, was a 2-lane road through open farm fields. Fifteen years later it was an 8-lane divided highway surrounded on both sides by miles of strip malls and giant tract houses. It's waste on an absolutely massive scale, all so people can live somehwere "nice." And 40 years from now it'll be an abandonded wasteland like Detroit as people move on to next new deveopment. It's sad.

 

[Capt Worley PE]

It is. . . don't get me started. . . All the the infrastructure, the nice houses. . . Detroit has everything you need for a great city. But people don't want to live in the city, they want new houses and to live in suburbia so they keep moving farther out and developing the greenfields. When I was growing up, Hall Road, about 20 miles north of downtown Detroit, was a 2-lane road through open farm fields. Fifteen years later it was an 8-lane divided highway surrounded on both sides by miles of strip malls and giant tract houses. It's waste on an absolutely massive scale, all so people can live somehwere "nice." And 40 years from now it'll be an abandonded wasteland like Detroit as people move on to next new deveopment. It's sad.

The important questions here are:

1) Why did people wish to leave the city?

2) What did the city do to address question 1?

People vote with their wallets. In my experience, cities have taken the short sighted view of pointing out their attributes when responding to citizens' concerns, rather than addressing the concerns.

Now some of them the cities can't do much about, like people wanting more personal space, but taking this as an example, I've seen cities respond to this with, "But, we have parks." Parks aren't personal space.

 

[Krakosky]

Hall Road makes me want to barf. Everyday it's stop and go traffic nearly all day long. Saw a pretty bad accident a couple days ago bc someone obviously wasn't paying attention and rear ended the car in front of them hard. Thinking about moving to an apt in Royal Oak. Should be a nice change of scenery.

 

[Dexman PE PMP]

Denver has been fairly pro-active when it comes to "in-filling" some of the run-down areas of the inner city. The city planning department has started to make it easier for developers to come in and redevelop these areas to attract residents.

One of the bigger redevelopment projects in the area revolves around the new Fitsimmons campus. Within the last few years, the area has really started to pickup after two new regional hospitals were built (University of Colorado Hospital & Children's Hospital), and it's easy to see that money is getting pumped back into the neighborhood again.

 

[EM_PS]

Alot of cultural & racial action at play in the demise of Detroit, and other MI cities too. The 1968 MLK assassination really affected alot of industrial 'burgs up this way w/ hastening 'white flight' from the downtown areas. Big cities like Chicago, NY, etc were better able to absorb that strife. But Detroit's fall started more around the 50's anyways.

 

[Kephart P.E.]

It is. . . don't get me started. . . All the the infrastructure, the nice houses. . . Detroit has everything you need for a great city. But people don't want to live in the city, they want new houses and to live in suburbia so they keep moving farther out and developing the greenfields. When I was growing up, Hall Road, about 20 miles north of downtown Detroit, was a 2-lane road through open farm fields. Fifteen years later it was an 8-lane divided highway surrounded on both sides by miles of strip malls and giant tract houses. It's waste on an absolutely massive scale, all so people can live somehwere "nice." And 40 years from now it'll be an abandonded wasteland like Detroit as people move on to next new deveopment. It's sad.

A lot of the Political Right likes to take shots at my home city of Portland OR, but the land use laws and urban planning the city has done over the last 30 years has insured Portland didn't become a mini-Detroit.

We have our issues, but even in a down economy, rainy weather, and a high cost of living people are still moving here. I live in a older established neighborhood. My house was built in 1946 and is probably about the median for the city. I don't always appreciate some of our laws and city regulations, but it is pretty obvious this is the way to do it.

Wait 20 years and a lot of cities in the South/Texas are going to be in the same boat as they are making the same mistakes that Detroit did, ie allowing the "free market" to determine how and where developments are built and just building more freeways to connect them.