Detroit Couple Ready to Move after Robbery

[David L]

This is a sign for a much more pressing problem in Detroit: B and E is at historic highs in the city proper and is an epidemic!
Middle class black families want out! The security companies are overwhelmed

[Scottathew]

Middle class black families want out!

And the families that can't make it out are sending their kids to other school districts. I worked for Madison District Schools a while back. At the time they were facing an enrollment crisis. The school district had low test scores, and people were avoiding moving to the school district if they were looking to raise a family.

However, even though this failing district was 2nd worse only to Pontiac within Oakland County, it was amazingly better than DPS. Literacy rates were much, much higher. Dropout rates much lower.

At the time I worked there, 33% of the high school population was made up of kids from Wayne County [[presumably almost all from Detroit). Some of the kids had to take two, three, and in one case I knew of, four buses to get to school [[DDOT\SMART).

It amazed me what drastic steps folks were taking so that there kids could have a better life, and just how bad things were in Detroit, that the bottom of the barrel in Oakland County was something that people would go so out of there way to get to.

While its exciting to see all the momentum downtown, with lots of jobs being moved and created. However, it's sad to see that many neighborhoods continue to decay. When people get enough money to move to somewhere safe, they have a duty to their family to do so.

It's a vicious cycle, and I wish I knew what the answer was to fix it. Reducing crime drastically and drastically improving DPS is what needs to be done, but how the hell do we do that? I don't think it's impossible, but the answer is beyond what my mind alone can think up.

[evergreen]

Just had another neighbor advise me this morning that she is giving up. Even though she's turned her home into a fortress, the thieves keep probing etc. etc. They broke into her parked car and that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

They call them property crimes, but they really wear at the psyche.

This will be my last summer in Detroit. The neighborhoods in this city are on a death spiral and there's no reasonable probability of an intervening force stopping it.