Warning or opportunity for Detroit?

[Stravo]

Sammy, I agree w/ all three points you've listed. I just hope you understand that people can do all three & still lose their shirts due to circumstances they couldn't control. They used to be given a hand up, but today they are more likely to be despised. Been there, done that. It sucks. Our society has a mean spirit on the loose, & that can destroy the best of dreams.

[ndavies]

Zillow estimates are completely useless in Detroit. During the recession they way overvalued things. Now they dramatically trail the reality of Detroit. The thing that counts are actual sales records. The Freep data used actual sales records.

[Jason]

By long downturn you mean 70 years? There is no excuse for blaming any one group for events that occured over such a long period of time.

The “fortunate few” are actually many. I hope I’m one. Sure there are many more on this forum who stuck thier neck out and put skin in the game at the right time. Collectively, I would not doubt there are by multiples more money poured into Detroit than all the institution and city money combined. Works that way in the stock and bond markets.

PS. Have you ever thought that maybe every prior attempt at revitalizing Detroit was hindered by someone’s failing Social Justice agenda?

https://youtu.be/cnwxUhB9w_M

The problem is not the free market but instead when individuals vote for governments that steal from the productive class to pay for the non productive class. Socialism is and always has been a failure. If there’s a middle ground, then the market needs to find it, not have it forced upon it.

Amazing, all you have to do to escape poverty is pay more for your food, housing, and medical care, and once you do that you'll have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in real estate.


As far as the original question goes, Detroit's problems are very real and are at a massive scale. It's hard for me to understand how someone could view these problems as building blocks of a utopian society while still taking the problems seriously. As it is, most of Detroit is essentially a dystopia. Detroit also has strengths and potential, and I'm personally optimistic about the future, but I think it's an unavoidable fact that different people will benefit to different degrees depending on their individual circumstances.

[Johnnny5]

Looking again at the link I originally posted it appears to be current numbers from February of 2018, not 3 years old. Either way, my apologies for taking this thread off the tracks.

[Jason]

Even still, most of the people who have lived in Detroit for decades, and own their homes, because homeownership is supposed to help you build wealth, have lost money on their investments.

Most of the rental homes in the city can't charge high enough rents in order to pay for basic maintenance of the houses. They're riding out their rental properties with the absolute bare minimum and hoping that by the time the property completely falls apart they'll have made some money off it.

Real estate investments in Detroit are only benefiting people who: have access to capital, have knowledge of the real estate market, have the right skills and connections to wade through city bureaucracy, were buying in the last 10-15 years [[not before), and have enough money that if their risky investments don't pan out they can still live. And this is on top of their day jobs, which is where they're getting the money to invest in the first place, raising their families, and doing everything else that normal people do. Even your typical middle class suburbanite isn't in the position to be a successful real estate investor.

So it's good that it's happening, and it's good for the city overall, and it's good for almost everyone, even if indirectly. But it's really a stretch to say that your average person in either Detroit or metro Detroit can get into the real estate game.

[stasu1213]

Unlike other major cities Detroit has so much empty land, sparsely used avenues and boulevards, and empty retail strips to play with. The Dequindre Cut is one of the creative things that were done in the city by making a former railroad passage into a bike/walking greenway. Tony Goldman, the developer of Soho and South Beach had said during his visit to Detroit that Detroit should not try to become a metropolis such as Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. Detroit should stay at it's own style as a town but more functional with a mixture of the Arts, retail and work spaces[[something in that manner). I think that his vision of downtown was a little different than Gilbert's vision of what downtown and the rest of Detroit should be like. Not that I'm crapping on Gilbert. I think that Detroit is in a better position than it was 60 years ago when it was hemorging but everyone just though it was a paper cut

[Stravo]

Statsu, are you familiar w/ the propositions posed by Permaculturists? Wouldn't it be exciting to make Detroit a sustainable, green city w/ good, affordable housing & human-scale design? I don't think people would mind building up as long as there were privacy, gardens & parks, & tons of little shops everywhere along w/ clubs & coffee-tea houses, etc. Instead of the bottom line, how about people & their environment first? And surround the area w/ forests & wildlands. As Russell Means said, we are the new Indians. Do we want to befriend the retros who brought us to this place or move forward to create & adapt to nature?

[Pat001]

Detroit is a precious opportunity for a new, people-based arcology...

Even after looking up "arcology" I don't understand this.

[mwilbert]

Even after looking up "arcology" I don't understand this.

Understandable, as the term has nothing to do with Detroit as it was, is, or in all likelihood, will be. If someone wants to create an arcology someplace in Detroit, I think that would be a great experiment, but it has nothing to do with what is actually happening, good or bad.

[Richard]

Understandable, as the term has nothing to do with Detroit as it was, is, or in all likelihood, will be. If someone wants to create an arcology someplace in Detroit, I think that would be a great experiment, but it has nothing to do with what is actually happening, good or bad.

Why,you had enough of social experiments?

I think the original concept of Walt Disney and his Epcot was the closest to that,my sister lived in a downtown Minneapolis apartment that was attached to the skyway system there and she really never had to go outside for anything.

But she had a trust so there was no need to figure out how to actually pay for it all.Somebody has to.

The whole self supporting part is a bit iffy because it contains service jobs that the employees would not be able to make enough to live in the sphere anyways,so unless it is communal it would be the rich and the Serbs catering to them and then going home outside of the bubble at the end of the day.

[Dumpling]

Stravo, you remind me of a college friend who, back in the
late seventies or early eighties, was distressed at losing an
original Paolo Soleri drawing or plan or whatever it was.

This is beautiful and advanced stuff of course but the friend
thinks that if you want to do something more interesting or
advanced in terms of building art ecological design you have
to do it somewhere else other than Detroit.

Here is the page Warrendale the neighborhood is on today. The
Motor City Makeover will happen in May, but plenty of makeover
can surely happen sooner than that.

The Dearborn City Council just prevented a Holiday Inn Express
from being built adjacent to Warrendale. Warrendale activists
are apparently not pleased that the existing adjacent hotels don't
keep their walls facing the neighborhood free from graffiti, or pick
up the trash deposited next to the walls that blows over from the
Southfield Freeway, or what would endear them to another hotel
good neighbor, send out a delegation of grounds keepers to clean
the brush and dumps along the Southfield Freeway north of Ford
Road.

Wishing you well in your collaboration with Holiday Inn Arcology
and maybe even in Detroit!