There is a decent blogger by the name of Sweet Juniper who blogs about living amidst the decline on a daily basis. He has some phenomenal pictures of the old book depository. I consider him to be a very good writer although I’m probably to the right of him politically. He started as a “mommyblogger” but has morphed into something more.
Wow. That is just awful “analysis,” and shows a complete and utter ignorance of Detroit’s history.
As Mr. Moto said, the Detroit governments of the 1960s and 1970s weren’t perfect by any means, but anyone who would simplistically blame the city’s plight on “corrupt city government” just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
If you’re actually interested in learning about the city’s past, might i suggest that you start with one of the best urban histories of the past couple of decades, Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). It won half a dozen major awards, and is an outstanding study of the city’s postwar problems.
Here is his Flickr set. There are some he posted recently of an abandoned school, now in the middle of urban prairie that are unbelievable.
Cool photos!
*DETROIT (AP) – Welcome to Landlord Nation, where foreclosure notices are plentiful and for-sale signs offer at least 1,800 homes for under $10,000 that once were worth at least 10 times more.
In extreme cases, homes are on sale for $1 or less, which has enticed investors to Detroit from as far away as the United Kingdom and Australia.
<snip>
“They’re coming to us, saying `Look, I want to buy 50, 100, 1,000.’ They want to own every decent and cheap house they can find.”*
I wonder if that’s really smart or really dumb.
Some of those pictures look like Fallout 3 screenshots.
“Mommyblogger”?
Wow. Scrolling northward in the map view, there are blocks and blocks that seem to be returning to prairie.
I saw a suggestion on another board that the best thing to do would be to buy and demolish the remaining abandoned houses in these areas, actively restore the land to farming, and make Detroit the first large city the USA to be self-sufficient in food.
Unless outside sources supply money they can’t demolish all the buildings less alone purchase them. One problem that they considered legislation for was having to try and find the owners. I don’t know if they got around the extra hassle of searching for owners. The main issue is the city doesn’t have the money to demolish these buildings, and can only do a small percentage each year.
My WAG would have been that the owners would have long since stopped paying property taxes, the city would eventually seize them, resell if possible, hold any profits in escrow.
Of course, that still wouldn’t address the demolition issue.
ETA @mhendo: the pdf doesn’t work. It must be available only to subscribers.
That’s the generic term for the parent blogging community, usually even during the (rare) instances the blogger is a father. Also, he originally started the blog with his wife, who used to write on there a lot more than she currently does.
Hmmm…Harrisburg has had some success attacking blight with land value taxation. I wonder whether that could help some in Detroit as well.
You mean people blogging about being parents? As opposed to bloggers who happen to be parents, but are blogging about something else? “Mommyblogger” sounds vaguely insulting; am I misinterpreting that?
Detroit has the highest tax rates in the state. It’s a large, urban city where there were a lot of things, now the people are gone.
The people are still around, however. The Metropolitan Detroit area is huge and there are many folks there, but the white flight scarred the city.
This links to a page of articles that discuss various contributing factors of the decline of a particular street/neighborhood in Detroit.
Bloggers who are about to be parents, or are parents, who blog about raising children, their children in particular, and generic parenting issues. I don’t really think mommyblogging is a dismissive word, as many or most of them use the same word to refer to this genre.
The reason it’s called mommyblogging is that a solid 90%+ of parent blogs are run by mothers.
When I said his blog has become “more” than what it used to be (focused on parenting), I meant that he has moved on from that particular sub-category of blogs, though it’s hard to peg him these days. He consciously quit blogging about his children, I think for privacy reasons. There are some rare posts about parenting as a general topic. So is it a Detroit blog? Political blog? Lifestyle blog? It’s hard to say because he jumps from subject to subject. However, the blog is no longer focused on his experience of raising his daughter.
Is that the reason Detroit still even exsists? Is the metro area doing well? It must be. For a city that looks so awful, is empty, has houses selling for $1, etc. I don’t understand how they can still be hosting NCAA finals and have 4 major sports teams (Lions, Pistons, Tigers, RedWings) that other cities would kill to have.
There must be two seperate worlds there, dying and dead city of detroit, and thriving and bustling metro Detroit.
Ah, okay, thank you.
Not all of Detroit is decayed. There’s still plenty of modern technology to be found.
That’s odd.
The link is actually to a blog, and the person has downloaded the PDF and put it on their own site. There’s shouldn’t be any subscription issues. On the Harper’s site the article is, indeed, only available to subscribers.
Right. My folks live in a distressed community in Pennsylvania that implemented this system - they saw their rates go down.
A higher rate of tax was calculated on the value of the land, but the value of the buildings on it were ignored. There was therefore no longer a disincentive to improve property. And while it has been too early to tell how this has worked for my folks, it seems to have worked in Harrisburg.
Imagine if the owners of those downtown skyscrapers were taxed on just the cost of the land. They might be sitting on a more valuable property that they’d repair. And this might raise the value of the surrounding properties - it certainly wouldn’t hurt at this point.