Quote Originally Posted by nain rouge View Post
Am I the only one who finds something odious in all of this new urban planning? Correct me if you I'm wrong, but it seems like the game plan many urban planners in Detroit are trying to push goes like this: convert the poorest neighborhoods into farms, and gentrify the remaining neighbor
I don't think this is a realistic concern. agriculture is a relatively low-value use and won't bring in enough money per acre to make it worth removing any viable residential property. But there is a lot of land in Detroit that isn't producing any income at all, and that might be worthwhile to use for some kind of food production.

I could imagine that if there is ever any serious relocation of people from the prairie areas, those areas might get converted to agriculture, but the relocation would have been done for other reasons, again because it isn't economic to displace residential use or business use for agriculture.


It sounds a lot like the brilliant urban planning of the 1960s, just instead of converting the blight in the city into concrete structures and roads, this time we're going to make them farms. How will this help fix Metro Detroit's social problems?
Getting rid of blight is a good thing. It fixes the problem of blight. I'm not sure how much else it accomplishes.

I have other concerns, too. How much money will farming really make for people in Detroit? It's certainly not going to rival the money industry once made in the city, right? And while ant green energy developments sound promising, does Detroit really have enough room within its borders to become a major player?
Probably not that much. I think I estimated on a thread a year or two ago that if you converted the entire land area of the city to agriculture, you might be able to employ 20,000-30,000 people directly in agricultural jobs, assuming you used all the land for high-value, labor-intensive truck farming, so in reality you wouldn't get more than a few thousand jobs anytime in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, you have to compare that to the amount of employment produced by empty lots. If you did a lot of vertical agriculture, you might be able to get more jobs.

You aren't going to produce a lot of green energy in Detroit--there isn't that much wind, and it is one of the least-sunny locations in the US. Of course there is no reason you couldn't produce green energy equipment in Detroit, if you could attract appropriate investment.