Gilbert states the Pistons should be called the Auburn Hills Pistons

[Cliffy]

I do remember Illitch wanted to buy the Pistons. I wonder what would had happened had he. Would he had brought the team downtown instead of Goras just keeping the team further North

Of course he was going to bring the team down. He wanted them for his new arena to fill up empty nights and also most importantly, he wanted them so he can corner the market on tv rights and have his own local sports station. I'm surprised he didn't get the Pistons considering they went for a bargain at the time.

[Bham1982]

It's time to annex all of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties together into one city and call it DETROIT.

It is the fare solution to solve many problems. Everyone can Win by everyone working together.

Are you the Livingston County Commissioner? Your plan would, overnight, turn Livingston County into the fastest growing county in the Midwest, with the strongest economy.

[Bham1982]

The Detroit Pistons are the only franchise in the NBA that plays its home games outside of the city that the team is named after. So, he's right, according to de facto protocol for the NBA.

There are plenty of NBA teams that have played outside the center city, and have used the center city name, including his own Cleveland Cavaliers, who played in Richfield, OH for most of their existence, and even the LA Lakers, who played in Inglewood, CA for most of their existence.

[GUSHI]

would definitely lead to a population boom in lapeer and st clair counties.

[davewindsor]

Mortgage interest deduction starts phasing out at a pretty low income threshold. No one making 13.5 should be deducting interest [[no one should be taking out a mortgage either at that level, but whatever).

Phasing out the income tax deduction at a pretty low income threshold? Please cite your reference.

From what I found, the interest on the first million of a home mortgage is tax deductible. Hardly low income:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/163
26 U.S. Code § 163 - Interest

see B ii

[[B) Acquisition indebtedness [[i) In general The term “acquisition indebtedness” means any indebtedness which— [[I) is incurred in acquiring, constructing, or substantially improving any qualified residence of the taxpayer, and
[[II) is secured by such residence.

Such term also includes any indebtedness secured by such residence resulting from the refinancing of indebtedness meeting the requirements of the preceding sentence [[or this sentence); but only to the extent the amount of the indebtedness resulting from such refinancing does not exceed the amount of the refinanced indebtedness.

[[ii) $1,000,000 limitation The aggregate amount treated as acquisition indebtedness for any period shall not exceed $1,000,000 [[$500,000 in the case of a married individual filing a separate return).

[Bham1982]

Phasing out the income tax deduction at a pretty low income threshold? Please cite your reference.

Mortgages are not fully deductible above around 160k [[adjusted gross). Maybe not "pretty low" but we aren't talking high rollers here.

[believe14]

I really want to give some of the people in this thread the benefit of the doubt, so I'm going to assume it's homerism... and not you know, a reflection of the region's public school crisis. Wow.

[iheartthed]

There are plenty of NBA teams that have played outside the center city, and have used the center city name, including his own Cleveland Cavaliers, who played in Richfield, OH for most of their existence, and even the LA Lakers, who played in Inglewood, CA for most of their existence.

But now they all play in their city... except the Pistons.

[TTime]

My original response was to a poster referring to Logan Square, Ukrainian Village & West Loop as "COMPLETELY transformed". He used the caps-lock, not me. A few of my friends have purchased homes in West Village, Boston Edison & Corktown, and although they would attest to changes as well, nobody would come close to calling them completely transformed. Ukrainian Village and Logan Square have much more in common with these neighborhoods than you might think.

We could continue a fairly normal dialogue about the first part of this most recent response but your last sentence leads me to believe that we simply see reality much differently so I'll just conclude by saying enjoy your weekend.

[subsidized]

Hahaha, Auburn Hills Pistons sounds about right. Auburn Hills sucks.

[believe14]

Hahaha, Auburn Hills Pistons sounds about right. Auburn Hills sucks.

Detroit would kill for Auburn Hill's commercial development.

[GUSHI]

As much as I would love for the Pistons to be downtown, all that would do is leave a pretty much empty building in Auburn Hills, Even though they are in the OC they are still our home team, I live in Shelby Twp, they just owned a new Kroger @ 23 Hayes-shelby side, but they closed 1 @ 23 van dyke and 1 @ 23 hayes --Macomb side, all that leaves is 2 more plazas w/ no anchor. So moving the Pistons to The D , would only leave another abandoned building, we have enough abandoned sturcures in Mi.

[Hermod]

If your income gets up to around $1.5 million, all of your deductions [[mortgage, state and local taxes, charitable deductions, and expenses have pahsed out and you are stuck with the standard deduction.

[chicagoforlife]

I think that Dan Gilbert needs to get over his obsession of trying to tell other people what to do. that's great that you're in reviving downtown Detroit and all but the Pistons play within metropolitan Detroit and if they want to keep Detroit as their name then they should be able to do that without any insight from Dan Gilbert.

[Bham1982]

But now they all play in their city... except the Pistons.

Yes, those 2 teams now do play in the center city. What's your point?

There are plenty of teams that don't play in the center city.

[davewindsor]

If your income gets up to around $1.5 million, all of your deductions [[mortgage, state and local taxes, charitable deductions, and expenses have pahsed out and you are stuck with the standard deduction.

I'm not a CPA. Cite your reference to the tax code with a link or this is gibberish.

[davewindsor]

Mortgages are not fully deductible above around 160k [[adjusted gross). Maybe not "pretty low" but we aren't talking high rollers here.

I asked you already, where's your reference to the tax code?

[Bham1982]

I asked you already, where's your reference to the tax code?

And I told you already. It's 160k or thereabouts.

[MikeyinBrooklyn]

as been the city's maniacal focus on downtown, fed by delusions of grandeur that seem to assume that SKYSCRAPERS = MANHATTAN!!!! Fact is, as long as the car is king, the days of the entire metropolitan area streaming into downtown to do everything are over. No big city really has that anymore. The real life, the real draw, and the real taxes are the neighborhoods. When you go to Manhattan on vacation, you generally don't go to the central business district at night to get your kicks. You go to a hip neighborhood.

Without knowing it, Dickens wrote about Detroit. Detroit is two cities. Downtown is aggressively coming back to life, with more businesses, visitors, residents, and prosperity every day. That is a good and right. Meanwhile, many [[not all, but many) of our outlying neighborhoods continue the decay seemingly unchecked. It's not that everyone has focused on downtown to deliberately spite the residential areas. It's that downtown's problems were tangible and fixable. You can lure someone in to open a shop, fix a streetlight, play a ballgame. That's downtown. How do help familyless kids? How do thousands of dropouts with drug habits reenter [[or enter) society's mainstream? How does someone with no history of employment in their family get the motivation to get up in the morning and look for a job? Those are our neighborhoods' problems. And they are- in a best case scenario- daunting, very long-term problems. Fixing downtown's problems are a cakewalk compared to the rest of the city.

I also caution everyone not to rely too much on comparisons of Detroit to other cities [[or other cities to each other). Specific things can be compared to each other [[buses in Detroit vs NY, or Detroit's riverfront to Chicago's lakefront, etc). But a thriving Detroit will never look or act like NY or Boston or DC or Chicago, any more than those cities look like each other [[they don't). Detroit doesn't have to emulate any other city to be successful. Some things will look like elsewhere; much won't.

[emu steve]

NFL Teams often have stadiums outside of their "name" cities:
Patriots, Giants, Redskins, Dolphins, Cowboys just off the top of my head.

Very interesting.

The Patriots, as older posters may remember, moved from Boston [[they were kind of orphans there going from stadium to stadium) to Foxboro.

They changed their name from 'Boston' to "New England" at that time.

I think there is a big difference between say the Dolphins, Redskins and the Pistons [[other than the balls they use for their games. ). [[one thought later)

The Dolphins play in Miami Gardens which is adjacent or nearly adjacent to Miami.

The Redskins play in a city which is nearly adjacent to D.C. and served by the subway system.

Gilbert was, as posters indicated, trying to prod the Pistons' owner that a NBA team belongs in the downtown, not far out in suburbia. Gilbert really doesn't care what the city name in front of 'Pistons' is.

P.S. in the NFL it is okay, I guess, to play in the burbs. Don't need nice restaurants to go after the end of work and start of the game. Just get huge parking lots and grills and the hell with public transportation. Who carries a grill and cooler on the subway anyway?

Games are [[normally) played on Sundays and folks tailgate.

[emu steve]

To extend my thoughts:

MAYBE fans are happier with the Giants/Jets in N.J. where there is plenty of parking for tailgating as compared to taking a subway to a Manhattan stadium without surface parking. I'd guess it would not be possible to have tailgating if the teams had built a stadium in Manhattan [[that was discussed I remember).

RE: Lions. There is plenty of surface parking in Detroit [[I read that a lot here. ) which means folks can tailgate as if it were a 'burb.

[Hermod]

I'm not a CPA. Cite your reference to the tax code with a link or this is gibberish.

http://www.lexology.com/library/deta...c-5538afc50cb2


It is called the Pease limitation and has been in effect for a number of years now. It was to have been phased out, but has been permanently encoded by the income tax compromise of January 2013. For a married couple, itemized deductions are reduced by 3% of the amount of income over $300,000.

[iheartthed]

Yes, those 2 teams now do play in the center city. What's your point?

There are plenty of teams that don't play in the center city.

My point is exactly what I said.

The Detroit Pistons are the only franchise in the NBA that plays its home games outside of the city that the team is named after. So, he's right, according to de facto protocol for the NBA.

[nain rouge]

But a thriving Detroit will never look or act like NY or Boston or DC or Chicago, any more than those cities look like each other [[they don't). Detroit doesn't have to emulate any other city to be successful. Some things will look like elsewhere; much won't.

Definitely. Maybe it read differently, but my intent with the Manhattan comparisons was to point at the ludicrousness of such a comparison. People in Detroit have big city delusions, for sure. There is way too much "Boston this" or "Chicago that", when those cities are in a different league historically and presently. Boston is east coast and extremely historic, and Chicago was over a million people by 1890.

Detroit was, essentially, the first modern big city. It's really just a cold weather Los Angeles or Miami, and how appealing does that sound? It was led by men like Henry Ford, whose motto was "history is bunk". You could almost say Detroit was a study in planned obsolescence. Aside from a few projects, no one was really ever striving to make a city that would last for centuries. The idea was seemingly to throw stuff up and forget it when tastes changed.

Just as Ford Motor Co. was always moving the bulk of operations to the next "bigger and better" factory, we were always moving to the "bigger and better" neighborhood. It wasn't until the Rouge factory the Henry Ford realized what an inhuman mess he'd devised, removing himself from day-to-day operations and hiring thugs to keep the lid on the boiling pot. Have we reached a similar point?

[jiminnm]

If your income gets up to around $1.5 million, all of your deductions [[mortgage, state and local taxes, charitable deductions, and expenses have pahsed out and you are stuck with the standard deduction.

Not exactly. Your itemized deductions, including mortgage interest, can be reduced by up to 80% [[reduction starts at adjusted gross income of $250K single, $300K for married filers). So if the 20% remaining is greater than the standard deduction, you can deduct the 20%.

As a result, mortgage interest is limited twice, first by the size of the mortgage [[only interest on the first $1 million of the mortgage), and then the potentially allowable deduction can be reduced by up to 80% depending on one's income.

Also, the personal exemption [[$3900 per head) begins phasing at the same income levels as above and goes to zero for incomes 25-30% above those levels.