Visiting Detroit Ends in Stereotypical Fashion

[jcole]

Bvos, I don't blame you. Get the hell out while you and your family are still alive and able to go. There's no point in staying in Detroit just to end up another statistic.

[BasementBeat]

My goodness Bvos, no one can blame you and your neighbors for getting the hell out of there.
It's really sad seeing crime spreading out further and frequently. It's hard to imagine what could possibly be done to turn things around....

[reddog289]

As with the rest of the City I really hate to see the way this has played out in Rosedale Park. As a teen I would be amazed by the homes in Rosedale not to say my Grandparents home was a shack off 7mi and Evergreen. Where I live crime happens but not to that extent, Lately anything positive that I hear about the City has been trumped by more negatives.I guess I was lucky that I chose to by my first home close to my work, Not where I would have liked to have lived if I had moved to the City.You can hope that things will turn for the better,Yet ya gotta think of your own safety and your families well being.Good luck Bvos

[MikeM]

My goodness Bvos, no one can blame you and your neighbors for getting the hell out of there.

I'm sure Jt1 will.

[rustic]

BVos, I am sorry to hear things are going so badly. I wish you and your family well. You gotta do what you gotta do. You gonna stay in metro Detroit or are you joining us in the vaaaaast diaspora?

BV, you know, my father had pointed out to me several years back that many houses in the Rosdale Parks [[both North Rosedale and South Rosedale) were being purchased by investors [[many were out-of-state). These investors were likely leveraging their personal home equity "assets" to finance the intitial purchase/upgrades to rent out the property to make the monthly nut, making minimal maintenance upgrades until they could flip it for profit. My Dad figured that things were gonna get ugly. Of course the overall METRO Detroit rental market has been pretty weak for like a generation [[or two) and the CITY of Detroit rental market is likely the weakest portion of the market, so these investors never saw the rental incomes they anticipated which stressed their investment. Add to it the real estate crash nationally 07-08 and the ~halving of stock market equity in '08 ... and the investor gets SERIOUSLY stressed and you get vacant homes. The fact that these vacant homes are attracting so much crime with poor police response implies to me that there is something else going on locally but I'm not sure what it is [[but I am a conspiracy theorist who grew up watching and listening to block busting stories from the white flight era).

BV, anyway sorry to hear about your difficulties, seriously I wish you the best. Things will work out.

[Det_ard]

That really sucks, BVos. Rosedale was a great neighborhood and still looks pretty nice on the surface. But when you have to think about more than just yourself you have to make tough choices like yours. For what it's worth I would have done the same as you, and I can only imagine how pissed and dissappointed you must be.

Rustic you mention crime at vacant homes but BVos talked about crimes to occupied homes. I might be willing to stick it out if the problem is vacant homes being stripped but when you have daytime home invasions in addtion to a plethora of theft that's a whole other level of shittiness.

I don't doubt some investors got clipped in the real estate meltdown but there were a ton of owner occupants who refi'ed all the equity out of their home and when the OT went away or they got laid off they couldn't handle the mega-house payment. They couldn't sell either as they were so upside down, and renting the home still leaves big negative cash flow so it goes into foreclosure and becomes vacant. Detroit was huge into cash-out refi's.

[shock]

I don't doubt some investors got clipped in the real estate meltdown but there were a ton of owner occupants who refi'ed all the equity out of their home and when the OT went away or they got laid off they couldn't handle the mega-house payment. They couldn't sell either as they were so upside down, and renting the home still leaves big negative cash flow so it goes into foreclosure and becomes vacant. Detroit was huge into cash-out refi's.

BINGO!!!

This Thread Rules !

[BVos]

Rustic, the first wave of "investor" properties went vacant about a year or two ago and have since all been stripped pretty much. The house kitty corner to me was one [[now occupied with renters who seem to be OK), across the street is vacant & stripped, next door to me is vacant after 3-4 separate and unsuccessful attempts to flip it over the past 5-6 years [[the last owner being an Orthodox Jew from NYC - interesting seeing him walking one day outside the house wondering what the hell he'd gotten into), next door to that is vacant and foreclosed, next to that is rental and about to go into foreclosure, next to that is empty & foreclosed due to someone who paid way too much and then lost their job last year. So the first wave of foreclosures has already passed through. Any house worth stripping has been picked over all ready. You'd be surprised how many investor owned properties that popped up over the past few years in Rosedale Park.

We'd like to stay in the Detroit metro since both of our families are here, but we're not ruling out an out of state move either.

[rustic]

BVos, yeah, that jibes with the trend my father mentioned to me about 5-7 years ago. Of course there are a lot of factors [[nationally: housing crisis, stock market crash, banking collapse, wars, ...; regionally: auto industry imploding, increasing balkanization, stagnation and brain drain ... ; and locally: two mayoral administrations that did essentially nothing for the neighborhoods [[Archer and Kilpatrick), further desiccation of Detroit's middle and lower middle class, increasing poverty and ignorance ...) but when you have a situation where a significant number of homes in specific neighborhoods get snapped up by absentee owners in what had until then been primarily a VAAAST majority owner-occupied neighborhood with extremely stable income demographics THAT represents a significant "change" to the neighborhood. I remember my Dad driving me up Ashton and down Rosemont several years back pointing out which houses were owned by out of state investors. It was stunning.

BV, re leaving the region, it is tough moving away from family esp. if you have little ones that have grown up near kin, but you gotta do what you gotta do. The whole SE Michigan region is losing households. The next census will be sobering for the region. Anecdotally, in my circle of family and close friends who were living in Detroit and the suburbs two years ago, only about 1/2 remain today. These are all Detroiters with deep roots, history, family ties, etc.

[BVos]

We're going to stick it out until the spring in the Detroit area [[hopefully not in Detroit proper though). If the job picture doesn't improve we'll head east more than likely.