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The median house price of a house in Detroit is now $7,500.
Duki
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Stolen from another forum:
Article here.
Well holy shit. Some of this stuff is mind boggling.
This is a fairly impressive disaster of a city. The implosion of big steel after the categorical removal of subsidies, tariffs and quotas within the auto-industry has left the city absolutely fucked. The automobile industry was systematically unable to adapt to changes in the marketplace, and this largely doomed the city's economy.
The question is, how do you go about fixing an entire city? The obvious problems are the lack of a strong economic base coupled with falling population levels due to white flight (although presumably it's not only white people leaving anymore).
So, what the heck can be done for Detroit?
It may be tough to get financing for a new car these days, but in Detroit you can buy a house with a credit card.
The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service.
Not $75,000. Remove a zero—it's seven thousand five hundred dollars, substantially less than the lowest-price car on the new-car market.
Among the many dispiriting numbers that bleakly depict the decrepitude of this onetime industrial behemoth, the steep slide of housing values helps define the daunting challenge to anyone who wants to lead this shrinking, poverty-pocked city of about 800,000 people.[/b]
One-third of the population lives in poverty, and almost 50 percent of children are in poverty, according to data from the Detroit-Area Community Indicators System. Median household income has dropped 24 percent since 2000, according to the Census Bureau.
New York bond-rating houses this month lowered the city's bond rating to junk status, a lowly assessment shared by New Orleans and few others.
On a positive note, Detroit's homicide rate dropped 14 percent last year. That prompted mayoral candidate Stanley Christmas to tell the Detroit News recently, "I don't mean to be sarcastic, but there just isn't anyone left to kill."
Detroit, which has lost half its population in the past 50 years, is deceptively large, covering 139 square miles. Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston could, as a group, fit inside the city's boundaries. There is no major grocery chain in the city, and only two movie theaters. Much of the neighborhood economy revolves around rib joints, hot dog stands and liquor stores.
The problem is more than a $300 million budget shortfall, said John Mogk, a professor at Wayne State University Law School.
"A thousand people are leaving the city every month," Mogk said, "and the city does not have the financial resources and the economic base to solve its own problems."
To be sure, progress has been made downtown: two new sports stadiums, a reinvigorated neighborhood around Wayne State and new lofts and casinos. But unlike Pittsburgh, which successfully reinvented itself after the decline of Big Steel, Detroit displays only islands of prosperity amid a dismal landscape. Neighborhoods have suffered, and foreclosures have aggravated the long-festering ill of abandoned homes.
"A lack of vision has held us back," said Nicholas Hood III, another mayoral candidate. "The auto industry was so dominant—too dominant—and we never prodded ourselves and the business community to a more expansive vision."
To the surprise of many in this overwhelmingly black city (82 percent), only 53 percent of registered voters turned out for November's presidential election, which featured the first African-American nominee.
Article here.
Well holy shit. Some of this stuff is mind boggling.
This is a fairly impressive disaster of a city. The implosion of big steel after the categorical removal of subsidies, tariffs and quotas within the auto-industry has left the city absolutely fucked. The automobile industry was systematically unable to adapt to changes in the marketplace, and this largely doomed the city's economy.
The question is, how do you go about fixing an entire city? The obvious problems are the lack of a strong economic base coupled with falling population levels due to white flight (although presumably it's not only white people leaving anymore).
So, what the heck can be done for Detroit?
Duki on
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Millions? I'm under the impression we'd sell it to Canada for $1 at this point.
There is no fool proof strategy, what has been done in the past cannot be copy/paste'd to the future, but there are trends: old industries fail, the city looses in economic power, an effort is being made by local actors to attract new investments and with a bit of luck a new blooming industry emerges.
Consider this: Detroit is so cheap all sorts of start-ups will move to the city after this financial crisis, among these start-ups will be the new booming industries. It does take a lot of effort from the municipality, the federal government, NGOs, civilians and the companies to paint a positive image Detroit, but it is possible.
We've already got Windsor. What do we need another failing city for? :P
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
I think that will affect the willingness of new start-ups in being there.
As the article said crime in detroit has gone down fairly significantly, but that is mostly just due to the absence of people. Another big problem is that with all these empty failing buildings there is a large squatter population who inadvertently set a lot of fires. The Detroit Fire Dept is overstretched and has one of the, if not the, highest rate of on the job injury in the US.
Like, google could buy detroit, kick everyone out, and turn it into tech-mecca if they wanted to.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
That'd be awesome
What amounts to a massive takeover of the city from an outside investor really could theoretically work, the only problem is it sets up what is effectively some organization's own private town (which some people will hate on principle and just conjures Robocop a little too closely), and reintegrating the chunk you've peeled off back into one whole would be hellish. You know there would be massive resentment from the old Detroit side, and the new side if it worked wouldn't want to go back and pick up all the problems the old side had (think East and West Germany, but with East Germany being a crime ridden wasteeland).
I think all they need is some PR.
This is already a problem when an investor buys up one apartment block, on the scale you're thinking on it would take years and years to get a substantial area empty. Of course, you could just not do anything for these people and claim that in a few decades time they're going to thank you for making the city into an economically healthy area, but I don't think that is politically viable. Or at least, I hope it isn't, because damn.
I think Detroit has entered an extreme enough decline you could outright bypass a lot of those issues. For getting people to move, it's not like housing is scarce or expensive in the city and I'm sure you could make it roughly timely and a boon to the community while doing it, though from a legal point of view you'd basically either need an entirely new legal framework or you'd never get off the ground. From the pie in the sky, theoretical angle you could convert some of the areas you won't level into apartments, offer anyone that had to move work at a relatively low wage job (if nothing else, the places that are going to be demolished can be lucratively stripped of piping, wiring, etc), and balance the whole thing so at a bare minimum everyone who moved could afford to go somewhere else. Which covers 1, 2, and 4 and I think if you've done that 3 (which is a weak complaint in general) can be safely ignored.
Again, this is just the kind of thing you'd write up as a master's thesis to play with the numbers, not something that's necessarily viable in the real world. Eviction is a months to years long process, you'd never be able to pull of something this big without pissing people off, and no one would be willing to risk that kind of money without guarantees. The reason I bounce back to this idea (it's come up before elsewhere) is because Detroit really has passed into a unique place. It's huge, a mess, and at this point I think anything that isn't massively outside the box simply won't work; all of which means the normal rules might not apply and it's worth at least spitballing crazy things.
You mean like this?
Some of those photos are horrifying.
Ok, so casual browsing from hundreds of miles away is not a good way to get an idea of what state a city is in.
OH LOOKIT THE DARKIES THEY CAN'T DO SHIT.
No, I'm serious.
That is amazingly depressing.
You could start by bringing down some of the already-unoccupied houses and rezone them to prevent a new house from going in there. Find the largest current blocks of emptiness in the metro and start there. When someone does move to Detroit, that spot is now off the table and they have to pick somewhere else. Kind of a soft gentrification. You don't force anyone out of an area, but once they're out, they stay out.
Even Canada doesn't want it.
But if we allowed the stuff to stand, maybe the prices would get so low that we could make it into a homeless housing plan and make a fortune recycling all the cardboard.
Of course, on the flip side, the Detroit city government is insane. You aren't doing yourself any favors when you're sitting mayor is arrest and your city council is incompetent and racist in turn.
They should start renting out the city to Hollywood. You wouldn't need nearly as much CGI to produce, say, I am Legend in the downtown.
Detroit has been little more than a skyline in the distance and that's kind of sad to me. I feel that if I had lived the same distance from Chicago, New York, Seattle or a whole host of other cities I would have developed some connection with them. I can't help but feel I've been shaped by mere proximity to Detroit... that some aspect of my personality is now defined by my non-relationship with the nearest large city.
Every time I read about the city or listen to discussions about the direction of the city the talk is often about the pervasiveness of corruption in city officials and incompetent politicians. Especially after this Kilpatrick nonsense... It's tough to see how anybody in Detroit is going to put their trust in someone to start fixing and bringing people back into the city.
Whether Detroit is in this predicament due to corruption or the downfall of the big 3 or incompetence at the city/state level... I'm simply not qualified to say. I don't even have an opinion... I guess I just feel like Detroit has been getting worse ever since I was born and hell, I don't even know whether or not that's true... Maybe it's the apathy of people like myself that allowed this to happen. Maybe Detroit is just a city defeated in a state just as defeated. I don't know, I just hope Detroit isn't too far gone to be brought back.
Sorry for the rambling nature of this post. My thoughts about this subject are quite disorganized. I just thought I'd share my thoughts as a near-by-liver, an almost resident of Detroit.
I host a podcast about movies.
I'm pretty sure you're right. Detroit has been crumbling since the '70s. If anything, the decay is just speeding up.
And I'm in a not all that different situation. I live in South Bend, which started its failed-auto-manufacturer-fueled decay in the early '60s. The city leadership has finally started to get the town going in a positive direction again, but it took them over 30 years to do it. They just started demolishing the old auto plants in the last ten years or so.
Ugh. My family moved from Vermont to South Bend when my mom finished residency. By the time we moved back to Massachusetts a year and a half later, we were all depressed.
Yeah, the city council is the big problem. They're completely isolationist, and they refuse to let outsiders come in and redevelop, believing that Detroit's business is only Detroit's business.
There's a building called Cobo Hall that's a big trade-show and general hotspot for the city. It's in dire need of updates and redevelopment, and the two counties next to Detroit offered to help go in on it and redevelop it.
Rather than agree to let them come in, and to join a 3-county-council with the other two counties, they just flat out denied it. They don't have the money to save Cobo Hall, and Cobo Hall is where the autoshow is held, so there may no longer be a future for the Auto Show, one of the last big, yearly events for the City.
They're total idiots, and they are EXTREMELY prejudice towards the middle class and those from outside of the city. Coleman Young, who was mayor of Detroit for a very long time, was more or less openly racist and an asshole, and the city loved him. These city politicians continue to follow in his shoes. They're damning themselves.
However, the current interim mayor, IMO , is doing a pretty good job. Unfortunately, he'll most likely be thrown out of office in favor of some ex-basket ball player from the 60s who has limited business experience running, of all things, a steel supplier.
Also, for whatever reason, they decided to hold an interim mayoral election right now instead of just waiting for the normal election in September, so there are TWO FUCKING MAYORAL ELECTIONS happening in the SAME YEAR.
You can't just say how simple it'd be to start redeveloping when the biggest problem the city is facing is itself. These politicians are totally fucked.
Soul destroying.
If a company were to buy out huge areas, at lets say 10% above market value, then that would still not deal with the biggest difficulty which is evicting the squatters. I imagine most owners would agree anyway. There would need to be a blanket policy enforced to get squatters out so demolitions could be done -which goes against their rights afaik.
I am trying to imagine the sales pitch on this. 'Boss, I got an idea, let's buy detroit.. no, no, hear me out...'
It doesn't matter, because you could never get the city council to sell. They're so ass backwards, you could offer them a fuckton of money for just a part of the city, and they would flip their shit.
As I envisioned this, the City council is part of the problem, so it would be agreed and organised above their heads. In other words, The president and Govenor of the state would push this through (and whoever else is relevant - not my political system so am mildly unawre beyond what I learnt through the west wing), obsoleting the council entirely. I fear the constitution or some other legal document would stop this though.
It wouldn't be a Federal thing at all. And though I've lived in Michigan my whole life I could not tell you what the Michigan Constitution says about the relationship between State and City governments. I mean, Ann Arbor made pot possession a civil infraction back in the day somehow despite drug laws being a Federal thing.
Yeah, there are some people trying to do the same in Pontiac. If it works, good on them; but in situations where it has worked before (Portland, Brooklyn and the LES of NYC), the 'artists' typically feel really betrayed and alienated when rich white people start moving in and completing the gentrification process.
I get really annoyed when they complain so much about something that they initiated to begin with.