Detroit politics

Nobody from the 'burbs (the Greater Metro Detroit area has something like 8 million people) goes down in there except to one of the "islands of safety", such as Greektown, Mexicantown, one of the casinos, or the waterfront during a festival, or a sports arena and the few nearby blocks with parking.

The city, like the state itself, cannot attract any business without massive tax breaks.

Given the causes are driven by long-term politics, as cynical as it sounds, I say let it die. And I live right down the road.
 
The immediate Wayne State area is safe as well, though once you step away from campus, it's as though you are in ghost town. I kept expecting tumbleweeds to roll past.
 
corplinx said:
I was about to make a reference to Nagin, Herenton, and Marion Barry and about how blacks keep re-electing the most corrupt or incompetent mayors in large urban areas. However, whites re-elected Nixon so we can't throw stones.
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My comments were certainly not about race...and I hope they didn't come off that way. As it goes in Detroit...Gibbs was a terrible mayor and white (though not re-elected). Colman Young...re-elected too many times...was in the spirit of many a big city boss -- black or white -- simply too incompetnet to be a Daily or a Harold Washington. As noted, I like Denny Archer a great deal.

Detroit's problems are far greater than any single mayor, IMO, could figure out. The racial divide is huge, but the shift in economic base and the decline of the Auto industry is a global not local/racial phenomenon.

Detroit just makes me sad. I once lived in Cork Town down by the Old Tiger Stadium. I enjoyed it...though it wasn't a "secure" neighborhood by any means. But, as I said, I come from Flint and still can remember the streets of downtown Flint full of stores and shoppers, now it is just a post-apocolyptic movie set.
 
A friend of mine who is a Canadian urban planner said that the Detroit urban area can be seen as a "donut." Content (so to speak) around the outside perimeter, but empty in the core.
 
If you want to talk about A-hohls getting elected: I know of a country that elected a washed-up old TV actor president. Twice.

SDC may be onto something about Detroit's proper size. Until new industries move in, the city could contract and probably be better for it. (I mention new industries because, before the automobile, Detroit manufactured other things. And probably will again. You can't beat deep-water access.) I'll try bouncing around the idea of getting smaller being a good thing, and see how people react.

Funny thing about me and 'Troit. Fifty-plus years ago, all of us out in Wyoming knew that Detroit was an awful place: dirty, dangerous, ugly, unwelcoming. Yes, it had that reputation even then. Was it an accurate reputation? Dunno.

Now I'm going to get Jungian, so watch out: Detroit is America's shadow city. Everybody wants to attribute everything bad to Detroit; they love to do it, they feel better for doing it. The fact that it's an 89% black city in an 85% white country may just possibly have something to do with that.
 
Well,

I am away from home and missing all the fun.

Originally from Pontiac. That is where everything that went wrong in Detroit is being repeated on a much smaller scale.

Graduated from Wayne State.

The reason people from the burbs only go to the "islands of saftey" is because there is not much else there to do. There are little places that many don't know about, such as the Dakota Inn Rathskeller, but they are few and far between.

The future of the city will lay in one or more new industries. Don't know what or when, but it will happen just because it is a really great site for a city. The port access is not much of an asset right now. Container ships cannot get up the St. Laurence seaway. There has been talk of modernizing it. But there are concern about importing more invasive species.

There is more development in the city than when Young was mayor. New housing can be had cheap. But the schools still suck. One thing that could help pave the way for renewal would be some urban homesteading. Ferndale was looking rather bad there for a while just north of 8 mile. Then some new residents moved in and started working on their properties. Those new residents were largely same sex couples who don't care if the schools suck because most of them don't have kids. Just and idea. Or a guess.
 
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Doubt: Tell us some more about urban homesteading.

I've got a superstitious belief that this poor old town can be made into something. Just takes the right approaches.
 
sackett said:
Doubt: Tell us some more about urban homesteading.

I've got a superstitious belief that this poor old town can be made into something. Just takes the right approaches.
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I have no expertise on the subject. I am an engineer, not an urban planner.

But the idea is not very complicated. You have a city that needs help. Many people with kids don't want to move in because it is not safe and the schools are not good. Property values are down and not likely to turn around through the usual real estate cycles.

Enter a population that does not have much in the way of kids and does have the ability to turn around property values. The most likely candidates for this are gay male couples. (This is a bit of a stereotype!) But the schools are not an issue for many of them and with some work the property values can start to rise.

Less risk averse families may follow starting with those who see a good housing investment and can send their kids to private schools. Tax receipts rise and then the schools may even get a chance to recover leading to more families moving in.

This is largely what happened to Ferndale. However Ferndale is a very small suburb and did not have nearly as bad a set of problems as Detroit. And the "new" industry there is night clubs.
 
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sackett said:
Funny thing about me and 'Troit. Fifty-plus years ago, all of us out in Wyoming knew that Detroit was an awful place.
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I assume you mean the Wyoming Curve on the Lodge, fabled in song and story, as in: "Big backup at the Wyoming Curve this AM."

One interesting thing going on is the rapidly growing Spanish speaking population, centered in SW Detroit. I think a lot of immigrants right now, but when their kids start voting, might shake some things up.

Bring more immigrants, that's what I say. Just keep those pesky Canadians on their side of the River.
 
Doubt said:
But the idea is not very complicated. You have a city that needs help. Many people with kids don't want to move in because it is not safe and the schools are not good. Property values are down and not likely to turn around through the usual real estate cycles.
Enter a population that does not have much in the way of kids and does have the ability to turn around property values. The most likely candidates for this are gay male couples. (This is a bit of a stereotype!) But the schools are not an issue for many of them and with some work the property values can start to rise.
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I've seen this actually happen in small neighbourhoods, and work well. Usually starts with starving artists, then the gay community, then young professional couples, then couples with kids... (then single moms looking for rich daddies, lol I swear it's true look at "Fashionable" Ferndale and Kitsilano in Vancouver) It can happen very quickly under the right circumstances. Canada being so much smaller than the US I can see it happening on a much larger scale in the States.
 
Beerina said:
Nobody from the 'burbs (the Greater Metro Detroit area has something like 8 million people) goes down in there except to one of the "islands of safety", such as Greektown, Mexicantown, one of the casinos, or the waterfront during a festival, or a sports arena and the few nearby blocks with parking.
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Too true. when I was out West 8 Mile came out. Very few people knew it was the border of Detroit. Most thought it was a bad neighbourhood/street. I was like "8 mile?, try 2 Mile or less, you can see the burbs from 8 Mile"
 
Doubt said:
Well,

There are little places that many don't know about, such as the Dakota Inn Rathskeller, but they are few and far between.
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I had my bachleor party at the Dakota Inn back in 1973 when I worked the Eleventh Precinct. Even then, John R and McNichols was a bad area. My partner was shot and killed at a bar just up the street from there.
 
A double update:

- Apparently a number of the text messages are extremely graphic and sexual in nature.

- He's fighting release of the secret deal with people suing the city, claiming the deal allows some other highly embarassing documents to remain hidden. But others are claiming that, since he used city money and was acting in capacity for the city that the information should be made public. People think these documents may be more along the line of actively doing things to silence these same people.
 
Urban homesteading in Detroit?

It's a nice idea. But I don't know if it can work in Detroit.

My sister bought a row house in south Baltimore for $1. and "sweat equity" some years ago. (1980ish?) Didn't work out so well in her personal case, but I gather this has done well in Baltimore. There are several sharp contrast with Detroit.

-- Baltimore's old (19th c.) housing stock, while it had gone way downhill, still had strong qualities and character. It included historic appeal, relatively solid construction, and was close to the center of the city, which also was undergoing development -- think of the inner harbor.

-- Detroit's analogous housing stock is cheap frame housing from the first half of the 20th c., with no appeal and poor construction. It's far from anything; the work all moved to the suburbs, and the center was abandoned and not successfully redeveloped -- think of the Ren Cen.

Detroit also has a peculiar property situation. I don't know how much this is because of city/ state laws. If I recall correctly, it's very hard to declare a property abandoned and seize it for failure to pay taxes. I have a brother in law who works in zoning and should ask him, I guess.

In Detroit, much more than in the east coast cities, the push was always outwards, away from the center. The east coast cities, from Boston down to DC, despite all the problems they've had, they have preserved concentrated central cities. Another way in which Detroit was like a boom town only on a massive scale: everyone wanted to move out and away as soon as they got their piece of the boom.
 
Some sociologists have noted multiple highways going right down to the core of the city. This allowed people to move out of the city yet continue to work there in the big buildings and factories. What's left? People susceptible to the promises of big government, and no shortage of politicians for them to elect. Now it's just a broken down place with high crime and too much taxation, a double reason for people to vote with their feet.
 
Today's big Detroit news is that the state supreme court rejected the latest attempt by Kilpatrick's gang to suppress the documentation around the case. I won't rehash it, anyone who is interested can go to Freep.com or Detnews.com. Read it and weep, or laugh evilly, as you see fit. I could say it's unbelievable... But is it? Or is business-as-usual only it got out? How much is Detroit-specific?
 
Presumably it contains the sordid, sexually explicit emails between the mayor and the his fairly attractive Chief of Staff, Christine Beatty, who is decidedly not his wife.
 
As far as you can make things out here on the scene, the deal was that the steamy bits would stay secret if Quaym paid off the two whistleblowers. But now the dirt's out from under the rug. Is the deal off? "Hey, you were supposed to keep a secret! You din't! So go whistle for your $8 million!" If that's the case, I have to wonder who really spilled?
 
And, uh, what was spilled. ("You idiot! You were supposed to get it dry cleaned!")

Small joke. Actually, in 2000, I received an appointment of an administrative nature (not faculty) at a Michigan university. The letter said that I didn't have tenure, but would serve "at the pleasure of the president." So I told my wife that I was going to have to get a blue dress.
 
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