A thread I started a while ago about Detroit relative to Toronto and Chicago.
How much of that market includes the suburbs?
The Detroit metro area is a lot better off than the Cityofdetroit itself. There are like 8 million people in the area with less than 1 mil of them in the actual city. Just go outside the city and it’s like a different world.
Yes, that is what I was thinking but neglected to say. Some of the northern suburbs are really nice places, indeed. I did not realize the metro area had that many people.
The Detroit Metro area is. The city of Detroit proper is not.
besides, all of the money to build those teams came from three places. Bill Davidson (Pistons,) the Ford family (Lions,) and The Ilitches (Red Wings and Tigers.)
Oh yes, there’s a fucking shitload of money to be made by privatizing fire and police services. And could you explain what is “socialist” about Detroit?
Sure, the Council has their heads up their ass. They turned away a good deal for Belle Isle. Corruption is an issue. Socialism is not.
I go to Detroit a few times a year, downtown is safe and bustling. Businesses are moving in. I think Mayor Bing is doing as good a job as can be done, and I thought Dennis Archer was a good mayer. Unfortunately, Kilpatrick was a crook and the Council is a joke.
Detroit is a doughnut city(well half doughnut against the river). Downtown has three big stadiums, a huge expo center, and lots thriving office buildings. It’s a bit empty at night, but for the most part it;s not that much different then any large city downtown. I say mostly because there are several crumbling, or abandoned, grafittied and decayed buildings visible, but 80% of the true downtown area is perfectly fine. Just north of that across the interstate you have the new Center with Wayne state university, an enormous Medical center, and other stuff doing great. The you have 6 miles of decaying society nobody goes to willingly. Then just across 8 mile road you have 20-30 miles of suburbs just like the suburbs anywhere else in the country.
It’s not a vast wasteland, but where it is bad, it is bad.
6 miles? I’d say it’s half-vast.
You’re right, better to bulldoze the place and sell it off the the governor’s bff’s at bargain prices.
Where do those people work? Primarily downtown, or have other suburbs become employment centers? I assume that the auto industry is still predominant, but are other industries moving in to any significant degree?
I long, long ago thought it should become an Art Colony — fairly soon after I stayed the night in the airport, in no way a desired outcome, and put a massive curse on the place which appears to be working — but more in the sense of rounding up wealthy Hollywood liberals, anti-gun, anti-racist, pro-democracy, ‘me-luvs-evvybody’ persons, who tend nonetheless to stick around their own - wealthy - kind; locking the gates and throwing away the keys.
Or they could be fitted with ankle bracelets, which keep them in one district for the term of their natural life. They could make films about their plight.
However, the only real solution is to ‘gift’ the place to Canada, with some few billions to sweeten the deal, at — ironically — gunpoint if necessary.
The Detroitards could be given dual citizenship and the Canucks could flood the place with peaceful Vietnamese restaurateurs. *
*Apparently the correct spelling: I couldn’t believe it either.
No, for them, it’s all or nothing. I still remember as a child when white folks would come in the 80’s and 90’s from the suburbs just to watch (and laugh) as Detroit burned on Devil’s Night. The State nor the other surrounding did shit except gleefully watch in morbid fascination. The Michigan suburbs (Macomb and Oakland counties are the biggest culprits) have been propping Detroit as the boogeyman since they fled the city in the 1960’s. The problem is that white people can’t seem to understand that austerity does not work. Cutting revenue sharing by $1 billion over a decade, voiding union contracts, furloughing of civil servants will not bring prosperity to the City of Detroit. There is not one city, one state, one country that you can point to and say “Hah! That worked!”. In the mean time, these clowns are sitting on their lakefront houses in St. Clair Shores tongue-clucking and head-shaking about how the Negroes can’t take care of themselves but sidestep the reality that Michigan has been slowly, but surely, divesting from the city for decades. If you live you don’t live in Michigan and want to see how State investment can help a city, take a stroll through Ann Arbor, Lansing, and Yspilanti (around the EMU area) and let me know what you think.
The driving issue is to gentrify and privatize Detroit until the poor blacks living there are forced to leave. Then the whites will claim their victory, but it ain’t a victory, it’s the snuffing out of democracy and silencing the will of the people. Government by the people, for the people, and by the people, ain’t just some words uttered by a former President, it ought to be scaffold that city and State government is built upon. To sidestep duly elected officials by putting in a non-elected official is disgustingly unAmerican.
Also, Mr. Snyder is an apathetic narcissist and a Koch brother shill. Fuck Macomb and Oakland county (props to Washtenaw for seeing through the bullshit) for voting for that man. He’s kicking up a whirlwind of schadenfreude against Detroit to distract voters from this terrible record as Governor and to obfuscate his attacks on unions in the State of Michigan. The clown is executing his wish list post-haste because he knows he will not be voted in 2014.
I think still less then 10k people work downtown, but it has probably doubled in the last 3 years.
Troy, Dearborn, and Southfield(maybe Warren too) are all employment centers and would be significant cities if they were isolated, but because they are suburbs they are glomped in with Detroit area, and only well known locally.
It works well enough for it’s purpose; just like laying for a fat merchant ship, ripping the goods out into your own treasure chests, slashing the crew and torching the wreck so long as one is a creative individualist regardless of the deserved sufferings of collectivist helots.
GM HQ is still downtown in the RenCen, but everyone else is elsewhere. Chrysler is in Auburn Hills, GM engineering is in Warren, Ford is in Dearborn, Nissan Tech Center is in Farmington Hills. A couple other Asian makers have significant operations in Washtenaw county.
So which Detroit City Council member are you? Thank you for illustrating my point. Sit there and blame the suburbs for being nicer places to live instead of admitting Detroit lost 1.3 million residents for very good reason.
The city still would have burned even if suburbanites had not showed up to watch.
I don’t know what you think the surrounding suburbs were obligated to do. As far as the state…you’re bothered by state officials stepping in to manage the city’s finances, but you would have had no problem with state troopers coming in to take over law enforcement?
So only black people understand that austerity does not work? :dubious:
Care to elaborate on that? How does state investment help Ann Arbor? It’s a nice place, but I’m wondering what investments the state has made that are responsible for that.
I’m sure Councilperson Honesty is referring to the state universities in the general area (U of M in Ann Arbor, MSU in Lansing, and EMU in Ypsi.)
Every new building that the University of Michigan builds there have funds matched by the State of Michigan. Same with Michigan State University and Eastern Michigan University, which is why many of these campus towns are, well, beautiful. Downtown Ann Arbor was revitalized, in part, by funds matched under the Downtown Development Act passed by the State of Michigan. Detroit gets no such treatment, as illustrated by the State’s nonchalance as their own citizens burned. The problem is that Detroiters have never, ever been treated as human beings in the State of Michigan. Ever. Oh, by the way, thank you Mr. Engler for of the mental health hospitals in downtown Detroit and flooding the streets and jails with schizophrenic drug addicts.
Detroiters are the big, nasty boogeyman of the State but the dance is same. In Ohio, it’s Cleveland. In Pennsylvania, it’s Philadelphia. In Illinois, it’s the south side of Chicago. Make no mistake, Detroit was deprived of nearly $1 billion in revenue sharing by the State of Michigan over the last decade so no need to be surprised when deficits begin to pile up. Coincidentally, the State of Michigan has $1.2 billion in surplus which is two-and-a-half times over to help the city. There is no will to help Detroit because the citizens of the State would rather see Detroit suffer and languish. They did it in the 80’s and 90’s and now they’re doing it again despite having the means to help.
To help your fellow countrymen, it’s something America conveniently forgets when blacks are in need of aid (e.g. Hurricane Katrina). When I was a kid, I heard fire trucks roaring down the street to put out fires. Where were the fire trucks from Warren and Farmington Hills? Where were the volunteer fire fighters from St. Clair Shores or Clinton Township? Then again, the suburbs probably thought that Detroit was burning itself because, you know, that’s what blacks like to do. :rolleyes:
STFU. The United States of America is built upon a Representative government. To arbitrarily abolish the powers of individuals duly elected by the people in free and fair elections is tying hands of democracy and silencing the will of the people. It’s disturbingly unAmerican, mainly because this country signed the Declaration of Independence predicated under the belief that taxation without representation is a non-starter. To lay the current fiscal mess of Detroit at the feet of Bing and Kilpatrick shows an excruciating lack of understanding of the political and economic landscape that’s shaped the City since 1974.
- Honesty
I also want to point out that, for all intents and purposes, Wayne State University (Detroit, MI) is much better - educationally and research wise - than EMU by leaps and bounds.
nvm.