Ideas to help Detroit Recover

[DetroitPlanner]

Turn Midtown into a Red Light District.

[Richard]

Turn Midtown into a Red Light District.

In order for that to work the public would need access to the restrooms

[MikeyinBrooklyn]

Turn Midtown into a Red Light District.

Surely this is a joke. All the development currently underway in Midtown would melt away as it became brothelville. To quote Richard from Casablanca, "I don't believe in the buying and selling of human beings."

[DetroitPlanner]

Surely this is a joke. All the development currently underway in Midtown would melt away as it became brothelville. To quote Richard from Casablanca, "I don't believe in the buying and selling of human beings."

It is a joke. It used to be the redlight district not too long ago. When I was a kid this area was full of hookers, drug dealers, transvestite stip bars, many of the aprtment buildings would have prostitutes on the steps waiting for people to drive by, all the stuff that would not be welcome elsewhere.

It is a nod to those who remember it to realize that things change over time. It may take a while, but things are better here than they once were.

[nain rouge]

There's a simple way to fix Detroit. Move there. Pontificating from afar gets us nowhere. Of course Detroit has problems. But if people move there, make the best of it, and demand better, we'll get to were we need to. Everything else is a waste of time. Patronizing a restaurant or stadium won't save the city. It only helps the greater city if it encourages people to move in, bottom line.

Metro Detroit, last I checked, had over 4 million people. We have the people to populate Detroit. We just lack the will to fix the problems.

[erikd]

There's a simple way to fix Detroit. Move there. Pontificating from afar gets us nowhere. Of course Detroit has problems. But if people move there, make the best of it, and demand better, we'll get to were we need to. Everything else is a waste of time. Patronizing a restaurant or stadium won't save the city. It only helps the greater city if it encourages people to move in, bottom line.

Metro Detroit, last I checked, had over 4 million people. We have the people to populate Detroit. We just lack the will to fix the problems.

Getting more people to move into the city is ultimately the only way that our problems can be resolved, but the question is how do we make that happen.


IMO, the solutions to our problems in the city are simple. We don't need to embark on some kind of complex grand experiment where we turn half the city into farmland, or make the city some kind of tax-free zone, or spend billions of dollars to demolish everything in some futile attempt to eliminate "blight.'


It seems that most people are looking for some magical "solution" to address the symptoms, while mostly ignoring the root causes.


It doesn't matter how many vacant houses we tear down if we don't do anything to address the root causes of why people continue to vacate their houses in the first place. It doesn't matter if we have some huge blight removal crew that goes around clearing away weeds and illegally dumped debris if we don't do anything to prevent illegal dumping and find a way to prevent these lots from becoming overgrown again.


The only solutions that will work are the ones that are very basic and simple. We need to PROVIDE BASIC CITY SERVICES. It's not complicated. If we had basic, reliable, city services in Detroit, it would have a dramatic positive impact.


We need timely, and quality, police response, and we need basic city infrastructure maintenance.


I'm not sure when Detroit stopped doing these basic things, which are taken for granted pretty much everywhere else in the developed world, but it was a long, long time ago. I have lived in the city for 17 years, and these basic city services were shit long before then. Some of the old- school Detroiters on this forum may remember a time when broken streetlights got fixed in a timely manner, and DPD would show up and actually do something about crime in a timely manner, but nobody in my generation does. These city service failures go back well over 20 years, and probably started at least 30-50 years ago.


Until we fix the basic city service delivery problems in our city, all of these grand schemes will prove to be futile. I think that we will continue to see redevelopment and growth in the core city areas regardless, but there won't be any kind of significant large-scale, city-wide improvement until the basics are taken care of.