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As prodctive as all of those threads which start "ooooh,ooooh, ooooh, I just heard from a friend of a friend whose barber told him that he heard from a cousin that Shmidlaps is opening a high-end cufflink store on Woodward. The city is coming back!!"Quote:
Originally Posted by Dexlin
Yep, for certain there is more abandoned property post the sub-prime mortgage scam that took many a home owner out. Whole sections or homes along Linwood are gone, Clairmont too. They were intact 15 years ago. And there are lots after lots of huge, expansive brown fields absent of any homes or structures on the east side especially and increasingly so on the west.
I am happy to see the development of Midtown though. Property is being rehabbed, people moving back in. Safer areas. It can be said to be just DOWNTOWN. Though some people think this close to downtown IS downtown [[smile).
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Originally Posted by Cincinnati_Kid
Perhaps that there is not much difference in what the city can expect per what policy is being put forth - or withheld - regardless to party!
Per what we are BEING TOLD and SOLD!
The coming tax hike is going to be jewel as policies and programs unfold out of the white house and Lansing and CAY building.
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Originally Posted by old guy
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Originally Posted by serpico
Is it "normal" for Detroit to have more murders per year than Los Angeles? or New York City with a population of 8 million to have about the same number of murders as Detroit with a population of 700,000? Detroit is not a big city, but it has all the big city challenges and more. Yeah many of us do travel and see the country. No other American city burns/destroys its vacant structures like Detroit does. East St Louis might be close. Sure the country has taken a hit economically, Detroit, has taken hits by a sledge hammer and blow torch by its own people. No outside invading army did this damage. Mile after mile of complete destruction. That is uniquely Detroit, and accepted by Detroit as "normal." The short term solution is for Detroit and Michigan to stop treating Detroit's problems as "normal" and tear down the blight today. Forget going to court, just do it. Forget making excuses, just do it.Quote:
Originally Posted by old guy
[QUOTE=DetroitPlanner;358341]Actually WCF drives a lexus! :D
What does that say about the owner of FoMoCo driving a freaking Lexus??
Hah! That's a good one. What IS up with that? Maybe he likes variety?
When have you ever seen WCF driving a Lexus?Quote:
Originally Posted by DetroitPlanner
This is a candidate for the 'Things that make me go hmmmm........" thread.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hamtragedy
I am having trouble parsing what it is about many posts on this thread that come off to my ears as barely disguised glee over Detroit's challenges. It feels like I am watching a kicking-someone-when-they-are-down session.
Why? Is it for personal gratification? Personal resentment? Does it actually help make matters better? Is it meant to improve the image of Detroit? Is it said to encourage those who are working diligently to make a life in the City of Detroit or those working to make it rise? What is the allure?
I don't get it.
Detroit has decades of demolition under its belt. I haven't seen any evidence that demolition is the answer to anything.
Slowly taking down structures is not the answer. The blight needs to be removed fast not years or decades. Doing business as usual isnt going to work. Demanding action from leaders is needed. We all have in interest in seeing Detroit suceed and prosper. I hate seeing Detroit collapse in front of me and leaders blame eachother for lack of progress. I'd like to see regional government with regional schools. One police and fire department for the tri counties. One school district for the tri counties.Quote:
Originally Posted by Novine
[QUOTE=Lowell;358547]I guess on one hand it could be said threads like this are a bit redundant,but on the other hand sometimes we get caught up in small circles in everyday life and find it hard to see the good,other times we need to hear somebody else experiences to see the greater need.Quote:
I am having trouble parsing what it is about many posts on this thread that come off to my ears as barely disguised glee over Detroit's challenges. It feels like I am watching a kicking-someone-when-they-are-down session.
Why? Is it for personal gratification? Personal resentment? Does it actually help make matters better? Is it meant to improve the image of Detroit? Is it said to encourage those who are working diligently to make a life in the City of Detroit or those working to make it rise? What is the allure?
I don't get it.
If I go for instance to city hall and have a problem ,I deal with it and move on none the wiser that the fifty people in front of me had problems also so the system does not get changed,if I think there is a problem but fail to respond to it it is because I am one in a sea of many and have no voice,if I then speak to others and they also say they had the same problem I am now a part of a group that then has a voice for change.
Mary lives in Corktown and she sees the positives happening everyday and can have a glimmer of hope for the future but Sam living in an area not so nice and has had no changes but hears everyday how much other places are improving,he may take a step back and become a bit angry or have a bit of less hope.
Sometimes venting helps,sometimes our words are spoken in despair and anger but without a medium such as this those voices would not be heard.
Weather it solves the issues at hand or not is anybody's guess ,as a public forum there are others that read but do not post but listen.
There have been a few threads in the past few weeks that end up in the exact same consensuses as to where the main issue resides,I do not believe that was the sediment a year ago.Or a group effort that now can see everybody is in the same boat because of the same issues.Rough way of going about it but effective none the less.
As an outsider I hear from expatriates that have settled elsewhere and I can now say to them ,yes Detroit has issues and no you are wrong in saying that nobody cares because from seeing here if nobody cared they would not be angry,but sometimes I confuse anger with frustration.
But the thing is everybody now knows where the crux of the problem is and coming next year they have an opportunity to make that change in the city of Detroit,they hold in their hands the unique opportunity to change 40 years of neglect and all it takes is the power of the pen at the polls.
You set the stage and others will follow,if there is a level playing field,but if you make that choice to do nothing and say nothing then you have to lay in that bed and it is business as usual but personally I think there is enough voices to tip that scale now.
A lot of things are going to start to happen in the next few month's,and there are some who will try to maintain that control or hold over those who they feel do not deserve to have a voice and are not looking out for everybody's best interests,they will use the media to scare you and to impress you,pay attention and remember those ones when it comes time to make your voice heard,everybody means everybody,rich,poor,what ever color because now more then ever it is time to pull together.You are the ones here and now that are tasked with changing a major city like no other in history .
I know it is boring and confusing to figure out how the new charter districts will work and how they will benefit you personally and the neighborhood you live in no matter where you are and do not believe for one second that the funds are not there as they are over and above and separate from the city,so there you are,you need to decide on a Mayor,and city council neighborhood representation and a few short month's to learn about things that 60% of the rest of the country does not even worry about.
"Slowly taking down structures is not the answer. The blight needs to be removed fast not years or decades."
Then what? There's whole areas of the city completely devoid of structures. What has that accomplished?
You are right Richard, and I would add that if you only hear one voice speaking on a personal grievance, it is easy to dismiss as anecdotal.
I think that Detroit is still a massive city at 700,000 if you consider that core cities with big metros are often not that populated. It is something to build on.
When I first looked at Detroit through Detroityes forums, I thought that the issues the city had were too big to handle by the municipal govt, and I still think that way.
The riverwalk is a project that creates a buzz and brings forth the quality of the city's waterfront. We can imagine using what is best about the city's total layout and neighborhoods to reconnect them in an imaginative way. I am wary of grand schemes, but I do believe Detroit needs a more comprehensive plan.
My list of wishes for Detroit and metro for 2013;
1-More citizen information and participation.
2-More comprehensive planning with state and federal stewardship.
3-Hiring of prominent but effective urban planners for a long term plan.
4-Regional decision makers getting down to project a metro type government;
One mayor for the regional authority, and mayors for secondary cities becoming boroughs of a larger entity.
5-A new scheme for a larger school commission or authority for the metro.
6-A new transit authority effective this year.
7-Police, fire and EMS covering the entire metro area under one banner.
8-More police presence in the actual city of Detroit.
9-A business conference devoted to attracting, inserting, and providing support for retail and other new concerns in the city proper.
10-A major conference of all cultural and business players in the city; museums, orchestras, performing arts to foster the creation of temporary venues in various places around the downtown, midtown areas; but also in the neighborhood cultural centers. This effort much like the many festivals in the city would bring the arts closer to the people, and use storefronts in the case of downtown and disaffected stores in other parts of town. These venues could also provide food tastings from restaurants round town.
I have checked out this site for a few years from time to time. I am an Urban Planner on the West Coast and was raised in a small, now declining industrial city in upstate NY. Professionally and personally I find Detroit fascinating, because in many respects I think it represents a not insignificant portion of cities and towns in the midwest and northeast, that have experienced rapid decline in recent decades.
I have been reluctant to post here because I am not from Detroit and I do not want to throw cold water on the enthusiasm and hope that is evident on this site. That said I believe the original poster is SPOT ON. Barring the following among the people and leadership in SE Michigan, DETROIT is dead: a real world look at the severity and extent of Detroit's problems AND solutions needed to turn things around; stop romanticizing the fledgling hipster/Gilbert/? "revitalization" occurring in a few neighborhoods, as it is not at all to scale with Detroit and SE Michigan's challenges; an ability to think and work as a region; and, bring your Governor and legislature into the 21st century regarding growth, investment and what makes regions vital.
I visited Detroit roughly a year ago for a week. Many of you will likely say, what does he know and you're right. A visit cannot compare to a lifetime. However, I know a thing or two about development, neighborhood revitalization and transportation and my insights are based on a broad perspective of having worked in many large cities. I visited much of Detroit, traversing it from end to end along the cities avenues and checking out many neighborhoods along the way. I visited nearly all of the small, still vital [[or vital again) neighborhoods such as Midtown, Corktown and Palmer Park that are much discussed on this site and I visited the vast areas of devastation or increasing decline that make up most of the city today.
The tremendous challenge faced by Detroit was brought into clear relief for me by the following:
1.) As the poster notes the ratio of stable or reviving neighborhoods to devastated or declining neighborhood tilts very heavily toward the latter. I went to Detroit wanting to see "the seeds of revitalization" against incredible odds. They do exist and there are a lot of good people in Detroit, but from what I saw the city still faces hurricane force headwinds.
2.) The reason for this became most clear when I visited a number of suburbs and realized that the process of middle class flight that destroyed Detroit is now underway in many of the close-in suburbs. People continue to move outward, and money continues to flow to the edge of the region. With zero geographical or policy limits to growth, there is no way to focus investment in Detroit and it's close-in suburbs. Given Michigan's Tea Party-influenced legislature it seems highly unlikely that any type of urban growth boundary could be put in place. HOWEVER, WITHOUT A WAY TO FOCUS GROWTH INTO DETROIT AND ITS CLOSE-IN SUBURBS THE CITY IS ABSOLUTELY DOOMED. There is simply not enough money at any level federal or state and certainly not locally to redevelop such a vast area and the market forces, Mr. Gilbert notwithstanding are still moving in the wrong direction.
Finally, on the day before I left Detroit I witnessed a crime that was telling in terms of what happened, where it occurred and especially relative to the reaction of all involved. At 9AM on a Friday at the Marriott across the street from the RenCen two armed, masked gunman robbed the hotel gift shop, while I was in the shop. This was at one of the better hotels in Downtown Detroit in broad daylight. No one was surprised or shocked. The hotel management brushed it off by saying that the gift shop was "outside" of the hotel. The only reason management was involved at all, was because as a witness to the crime I insisted on speaking to them. In reality the gift shop is visible from, and within 120 feet of the front desk on the other side of open glass doors. There was no press, and no expectation on the part of the police that the culprits would be caught.
I wish this was an unfortunate coincidence. However, the front desk staff made it clear that it is not, that "things like this happen" and I should get over it.
Things like this do NOT happen in most cities. It is NOT normal and the idea that anyone thinks it is a run of the mill event is sad.
If Detroit is to truly experience a rebirth it will take an effort akin to building the space program, involving collaboration across all sectors. To build support for such an effort metro Detroit's leaders and citizens would have to break down the walls that divide and the rose colored glasses that are worn too often and face the region's real financial, cultural and political challenges head on. I do not think Detroit's supporters are up to the task. I do hope that I am wrong. God bless Detroit and her people.
Absolutely SPENDID first post Alameda. Welcome to DetroitYes!!!Quote:
Originally Posted by Alameda
Then it becomes farmland. Abandoned blight is not attractive to the general public. I guess if you like burned out structures without roofs then Detroit is just fine in its current state.Quote:
Originally Posted by Novine
Take down all them unsightly buildings in the city. We need all that growth at 52 Mile Road. There, we are building our city on a hill. In the distant future, people will come from all over the world to marvel at all that concrete and vinyl and strip fenestration and say, by God, this stands the test of time.Quote:
Originally Posted by serpico
Detroit? That place archaeologists visit?
Alameda, well said.
It is important to hear about the lack of direction from someone with the knowledge of urban affairs. There needs to be as you said, a resolute effort, a massive one to solve Detroit's problems, and it is much bigger than Detroit's problem now. The state and federal agencies would have a gigantic task at hand to clear up the mess, and the will is just not there in the political arena.
The kind of cohesive effort that made it possible to rebuild german cities after the war does not compute in Detroit.
The lack of political will only translates the slow deliberate laissez-faire that lead to the disarray Detroit finds itself in. But it also shows the huge chasm between cultures and people who cannot find common ground on which to rebuild.
But a coalition can and should happen, there have been weird turnarounds in history and very surprising reversals of fortune. I certainly hope it does.
That is an accurate and mostly correct response. While I frequently champion the progress that is being made in the greater downtown area and the core of the city, the reality is that the majority of the city outside of the core is still in a state of decline.Quote:
Originally Posted by poobert
I must strongly disagree with your assertion that every single one of the better areas of Detroit have been hit with significant blight in recent years. That statement is absolutely false. The amount of blight in downtown, midtown, Corktown, Woodbridge, etc is far less that it was ten years ago. I don't mean to split hairs or argue semantics, but the amount of blight reduction that we have seen in these core city areas has surpassed the expectations of even the most optimistic Detroiters.
Back to the main discussion...
The solutions for rebuilding and revitalizing the core city areas are self-evident. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that historic downtown areas, riverfront properties, centers of art and culture, university districts, medical centers, and neighborhoods featuring these type of assets are inherently valuable, and can not simply be replaced by new construction out on the fringes of suburbia. We went through a period where these assets were devalued by American society at large, but that era seems to be waning, and the inherent importance of these assets is once again being realized.
This brings us back to question of how to deal with the areas of the city which, to state it very bluntly, do not possess a significantly large amount of structures, institutions, or geographic advantages which are inherently or historically valuable.
The answer to this question is somewhat complex, especially given the fact that most people see this as a Detroit problem, when it is actually a regional, and even more so, a national problem.
The most immediate and imperative solution is to bring city services up to normal American standards. As long as the city of Detroit offers vastly inferior city services, residents will continue to flee the city in droves. This is a statement of fact, and it is beyond debate. The city needs to fix it's service delivery immediately.
I don't give a fuck what anybody says; delivering basic city services is not some kind of insurmountable, Herculean task that is beyond the realm of possibility. If every other city in America can find a way to keep the streetlights on and send police/fire/EMS responders within 10 minutes, so can we.
When the city of Detroit fixes it's service delivery problem, the outflow of residents and deterrents preventing immigration into the city will be greatly mitigated, which will leave us to figure out the greater regional and national question of how to deal with devalued urbanized land.
This is the point of the discussion where there are no absolute answers. Some people think that the future of devalued urbanized land should be some type of reversion back to agricultural usage or even wilderness.
I tend to agree with the school of thought that thinks that our supply of fossil fuels is not only limited, but has reached a point of diminishing returns, where the cost of energy, especially oil-based energy, will continue to grow increasingly more expensive, and at some point the average person will no longer be able to afford to drive a car 12,000 miles every year just to get to work and conduct daily life.
In this scenario, the value of inner-city land increases sharply, simply because people need to live closer to one another in order to conduct daily business in a civilized fashion. This is the way that urban human civilization has organized itself for about 10,000 years.
The opposing school of thought posits that we have entered a period of endless cheap energy, and that the sprawled-out, auto-centric, suburban style of urbanized living that America invented around 60 years ago will be the standard template for human civilization going forward.
In this scenario, the value of inner-city land, or any previously urbanized land, has little to no value. When a neighborhood, area, city, or county begins to show signs of decline, people will just pick up and move further away, because proximity offers little economic incentive, and running away from problems and challenges always seems to be much easier than confronting them and seeking solutions. This is the way that we have been living for the last 60 years or so in America.
The answer to the big question about what should be done in Detroit really lies in your vision of the future.
If your vision of the future is endless sprawl and auto-centric development, then it would make sense to tear down most of the city and revert it back to a non-urbanized usage. If your vision of the future is a scenario where we rebuild and revitalize our existing urbanized areas, then it makes sense to focus on stabilizing and rebuilding the city.
Erik,
Nice, reasoned commentary. I guess where I disagree with you a bit is that while macro issues [[i.e. the price of energy) should definitely be something a city looks at in figuring out where it needs to go, a city should not be beholden to the study of macro issues. A real city - a real, successful city - makes its own destiny where it can; it doesn't wait for something to happen to it, it makes things happen. There are plenty of cities in this nation that had no real reason to exist where they did or exist at all.
I think we're particularly in an age, post-freedom of movement and now in the age of information, where a city can [[and has no other choice but to) make itself over. I think that just like in every other city in the nation that's not some coastal ocean port what's going to happen is that individual areas within cities will have to be very interesting and quirky to really flourish and most everything else will be lost. "Walmart economy" workers will largely continue to set up in the suburbs because that's where their jobs are, anyway, and we'll largely have little villages within cities reserved for the wealthy and/or creative. The single-family home-dominated suburbs-in-city neighborhoods will be lost because that style of living is dwindling if even slowly, and the people that still want to live in these type of neighborhoods now want to live in the "real" thing...in the suburbs, regardless of how good services are in the central city. I guess that's where the macro issues come in, because the culture will have to change before an area like Brightmoor or even healthier places like Warrendale are first choice picks for suburban-minded residents, again.
If you can't afford to pay for existing, outdated infrastructure, [[ as most of the country can't do) then you need to come up with a new plan and restructure the city to make it work. It seems somewhat obvious. It's the same as where I live. Lots of problems with the quality of life and very few people jumping in to try and solve them. Plenty of people complaining about them though.
The problem with all that great cheap housing in Detroit is twofold: public safety and public schools. That's largely why the property is so cheap. Years ago the Archdiocese of Detroit provided a cheap alternative to the public schools, but the parochial option in Detroit has largely vanished. And there is no solution on the horizon to the very real public safety issues.Quote:
Originally Posted by softailrider
Almost everyone I know who left Detroit in the past 5 years has left because of public safety.