Another New York Times article on Detroit

[mwilbert]

They can't get enough!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/us/26detroit.html?hp

This one is a decline/hanging-in-there article with specific reference to Grandmont/Rosedale.

[Pushtina]

When I'm with you, baby, I go outta my head...

[English]

The last section is particularly haunting:

Beverly Jones, 48, a director of day care at a Baptist church, decided to move to the suburbs almost two years ago. She gave up on Grandmont Rosedale after her house was broken into for the fifth time and her son, who happened to be there, shot one of the burglars.



The decision to leave the city where she had lived her entire life, and where she still works, was made easier because her house was in foreclosure. After she left, it sold for $9,000, a little more than a tenth of what she paid for it a decade earlier.


“It was time to go,” Ms. Jones said.

Until you get people like Ms. Jones to stop leaving the city -- and it is totally understandable that she would, given the horrific circumstances -- you will NOT get recovery. We are still in the mindset that this kind of thing is just another day in Detroit.

This kind of stuff used to happen in my childhood neighborhood 20 years ago and was unheard of in Rosedale Park. Keep it up, metro Detroit, and the NYT will be doing stories like this about Livonia, Farmington Hills, and Sterling Heights in 20 years.

[NorthEndere]

“If that neighborhood goes, the city goes,” said Kurt Metzger, an urban affairs expert and demographer who studies census data for the city

You know, Kurt Metzger is supposedly a smart numbers guy, but I've been reading quotes of his in the media since the announcement of the Census numbers, and they sound down-right incoherent or unnecessarily bombastic, sometime, and this is one of them.

Don't know if Kurt has noticed, but as a cohesive unit of government, the city is already gone. That train left the station years ago. No, Detroit went when the only people it could keep were either the upper middle-class who stayed because of fierce determination and loyalty or the super-poor who didn't have a choice one way or the other. The Grandmont Rosedale area - which, BTW, is a collection of differently developed neighborhoods - is not some magic indicator of the health of the city; time has already seemed determined for this decade what areas will and will not survive.

BTW, I was looking at the NYT interactive map for the area - thanks again, Pushtina - and while the tracts that cover this area did all lose anywhere from 10-20% of their population over the decade, that was actually good by comparison. I was looking to the west, and you can almost draw a line around Brightmoor the loss has been so great. In particular, the areas [[two tracts) along West Outer Drive in Brightmoor each lost nearly half of theirpopulation. It's amazing.

The only tract to grow in that area is the former Herman Gardens [[which isn't even complete, yet), and I'm not sure if this is ultimately a good thing or a bad thing. Parkdale at the extreme west actually had one of the smallest drops in town [[-2.2%). Warrandale [[include Herman Gardens) is kind of mixed bag.

[mwilbert]

In my opinion it was ridiculous to build new housing at the Herman Gardens site. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. Building new housing in Detroit is questionable, and doing it in that area makes no sense. It was already cleared; it should have been left that way.