Interesting news report from 1976 - The HUD Scandal

[Detroit Stylin]

Seems like the predators started earlier than people like to admit

[[6) 1976 SPECIAL REPORT: "HELL UPON DETROIT" - YouTube

[313WX]

That's been posted here before.

The real story is how that lower east side neighborhood [[bounded by Mack, Jefferson, Alter and Conner) got quickly wiped out in a matter of 30 years.

[Danny]

HUD, DHC and real estate folks has been doing block busting of old Detroit ghetto hoods since the early 1960's to lure poor blacks and other poor people so that middle class and rich folks and pack their bags and move to ticky tacky little boxes in the suburbs and ex-urbs. Slumlords are doing the same. The result you have block after block the abandon homes and buildings. You see today.

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3833...7i16384!8i8192

This is Phillip St in Detroit's East Side just 4 blocks west of Grosse Pointe Park [[a.k.a) Richville!

[EastsideAl]

I thought this was all common Detroit historical knowledge of how the devastation began. It really started a few years earlier than '76, during George Romney's misguided reign as Nixon's HUD secretary.

It really started here on the eastside in the area between Cadillac and Connor when the attempts to "save" that area through HUD's privatization scheme ended up devastating several streets, most notably Lemay, which was full of abandoned and empty houses by the mid-70s. It also affected the area around the Cass Corridor and what we now call Brush Park. You can see the disaster already underway in the 1976 housing survey photos.

[Hamtragedy]

As a wee youth I lived on Bewick btw Jefferson and Kercheval. There were several abandoned houses on Bewick at that time [[I got caught playing in a couple and my bigwheel restrictions were enforced). But this reminds of me the Southeastern High School 100th anniversary thread which only had 7 posts on it after three years. As touched on by eastsideAl, this entire section of the city has essentially been erased from the map by blight and the Jefferson North Chrysler plant, [[which cut off Vernor, Charlevoix and Kercheval from the neighboring communities), all in a generation essentially.

Granted there are several neighborhoods in Detroit where this has happened too, 12th street, Blackbottom, Delray, Poletown. This eastside neighborhood I'm finding more fascinating as my dad came here as an immigrant in the 50s, his step dad arrived in the 19-teens, I lived there a small child, and I drive thru it frequently. I've already accumulated stories from my step-grandfather and now I'm starting to gather them from my father, as his immediate area was Lenox, Algonquin, Springle, Gray, Anderdon all between Mack and Jefferson..."and the magical sunsets provided nightly by the Budd Wheel plant and all it's foundries."