Do we have any Flint, MI dopers around here?
I came upon this story on Slashdot today, and it’s raising a very good point, and follows-up with a viable solution.
Of course, however, with my being NOT in Flint, MI (or the 49 other named cities), I wouldn’t care so much to see these empty neighbourhoods torn down, so I was wondering if any dopers on the named cities would like to give their point of view.
Baltimore has considered similar plans. There was talk a few years ago of bulldozing a whole downtown neighborhood and selling it to Johns Hopkins Hospital (a major Baltimore institution) for some sort of biotech office park. I imagine the recession may have killed the idea.
In Gary, Indiana we have much the same, with entire blocks abandoned and falling into ruin. The big problems are gangs squatting in abandoned buildings and using them for various nefarious purposes, collapsing buildings are dangerous, and the abandoned properties catch fire every so often.
It’s not just homes, though - there are downtown high rises are are equally abandoned and crumbling. I doubt anyone will do jack until one of those collapse into a street, and maybe not even then.
The city and county are slowly tearing down the abandoned properties but even that costs money and the city is broke.
It actually seemed like a good idea to me. As long as it’s planned out carefully and nobody is forced out of their home. I do hope that they’re having reclemation and salvage people go into these buildings to save any pieces and parts that may be worth saving. Especially if they’re talking turn of the century era homes. Don’t just bulldoze it and dump it into a landfill.
On a side note, Broomstick if you don’t mind me asking, are you close to Marion by any chance? It’s the town I grew up in and I found myself back there for the first time in 20 years just a few months ago. It was a tad disheartening to see the state of my childhood house and neighborhood. But the town had been going downhill even when I was a kid, thus the reason we left.
Flints existing situation is the future of many other places. I wish people would remember and learn from this when developers are proposing new sprawl.
But some people just won’t learn when they see a friend get burned. They have to put their own hand in the fire to find out.
It’s too bad the abandoned buildings don’t collapse onto the gangs using them for various nefarious purposes and catch fire, every so often. That would pretty much resolve the whole crisis.
So are they talking about splitting the city into a half-dozen smaller ones, or keeping it as a patchwork?
I think it’s a great idea. Abandoned buildings look terrible, attract gangs, drug dealers, and other undesirables, and cost the city money for services.
I think it’s a good idea. Population gets concentrated in locations due to various reasons, not all of which will apply over a long period of time. We should have some way to deal with that.
So these city governments are going to DESTROY millions of $ worth of good housing? What a waste? How about removing the people who make these places unliveable?
I have a suggestion: SELL he city of Flint to a private corporation. Sell old factories to investors, and charge NO taxes. Remove the UAW, and watch manufacturing return!
And keep the troublemakers out.
The reason these places ceased to habitable was twofold:
-corrupt city governments, who kept raising taxes and cutting services
-unions like the UAW (there is a reason GM died and Toyota/Nissan/Honda are flourishing)-its called the UAW:smack:
WTF are you talking about? Do you think there are UAW members hanging out on the street corners preventing progress in the cities?
Oh, wait, you mean, like creating a union free zone. We already have that. It’s called China.
If that’s what they’re going to do, I wouldn’t like this proposal too well, either. The houses that came to mind when I heard this were tumbledown ones with boarded-up windows. They shouldn’t be doing this in flourishing neighborhoods full of well-kept-up houses. They may have to demolish some well-kept-up houses that are in neighborhoods full of abandoned ones, but a nice house with tumbledown abandoned buildings for neighbors is not going to do too well on the real estate market.
It’s not as if it’s free to keep these houses and keep undesirables out of them. It costs money to have police and fire protection for these neighborhoods and to provide them with essential services like garbage pickup and sewer.
It’s a hard pill to swallow, but it will make us healthier in the end.
I do have some questions about the practical issues with regard to doing the “back to nature” thing. I assume they remove the debris. What do they do with it? What about the underground systems, like sewers? Is there a danger of sinkholes forming as those things collapse? I’d love to know the procedures for all of this.
Do they play “They Paved Paradise and Put up a Parking Lot” backwards during the ground un-breaking festivities?
Troublemakers like anyone who demands livable wages or workplace safety, no doubt.
Here’s a Brookings Institute presentation (PDF) given to Flint on this very subject, with an examination of Pennsylvania.
I don’t think anyone is talking about bulldozing “perfectly good” neighborhoods. On the other hand, if there is one responsible homeowner in a neighborhood that is otherwise vacant, it’s a burden on the city to provide that person with city services. I see no reason why the city can’t say “Hey, continue living here if you like, but we’re not going to send the garbageman out to you anymore.”
This is interesting. If Detroit or Flint or wherever gets reinvented as a chain of smaller towns appropriate to the number of people who live there, and they demolish the abandoned buildings, and they broing back the farm fields and the prairie, that is all to the good, and it might even make the area a magnet again. But some of these abandoned buildings! In a recent thread, I saw pictures of the old Michigan Central Terminal, a train station with a fifteen-storey office building, sitting abandoned. Heartbreaking. And I certainly hope they offer the holdouts in areas to be demolished property of equivalent value elsewhere. But yeah, they essentially have to redesign all the subterranean systems for the new state as well.
It is a good idea until someone decides your block is the next to go - oh, your equity in your home? Here - we’ll give you “market value”. What’s that? Well, of course your property isn’t worth that much, it’s in a distressed neighborhood… And whose going to help granny move? Or that nice disabled man?
Oh please - it costs money to salvage things. Seriously. Hey, it costs money to pay a guy to bulldoze the place. When cities are doing this the project is done as cheaply as possible. Bulldoze-and-to-the-landfill is exactly what happens. Except in the actual city of Gary, where it’s just bulldozed. Then the rubble is left in place.
Nope, I’m in unincorporated Lake County, Indiana. Gary is the closest actual municipality
Actually, that does happen. Especially when homemade meth labs were common random abandoned houses would blow up every week or so (along with random hotel rooms and even cars driving down the road - there were portable meth labs in their trunks). However, burned buildings seldom burn completely down, there’s usually still some stuff left sticking up that should be knocked over before it hurts someone innocent.
By the time you get to this point, by and large the housing in question is no longer “good”.
How do you intend to pay for the infrastructure like water, sewer, electric, telephone, roads, etc without taxes?
Ah, yes, the police - which are paid for with tax money. Which you have eliminated by abolishing taxes. Way to go.
Just curious - ever watch a movie called Robocop? Coincidentally, it was set in Detroit…
Again - everyone assumes the debris are removed. Why? What makes you think anyone is paying to have the rubble removed? For starters, where would the money come from to do that?
If it IS removed (haven’t seen much of that around here, usually it’s left in place) then it’s carted to a local landfill.
Oh yes, definitely.
Me, too - from what I’ve seen it’s “knock it down and leave a mess that, we hope, the weeds will grow tall enough to hide”. With native prairie grasses in this area reaching 6-8 feet in a good year that is theoretically possible, at least around here.
Could be a viable, cost effective solution to urban sprawl, that hideous error, and contribute to correcting our carbon imbalance by returning more land to vegetation…I suggest community gardens which can help feed us, as opposed to untended weeds. (which would foster rats and other vermine, much in the way acres of vacant housing currently contributes to crime and drug abuse infestations, and result in future public health issues)
I personally think large areas of MANY cities could be razed to the ground to our collective benefit. An interesting approach.
I see nothing but positives in this proposal.
It creates jobs, sustainable ones, if it’s done wisely. A slow, steady approach to the tear down process would be affordable and green. Ideally a city employed office with a group of trained demolition and salvage workers could address the issue one home at a time. It seems crucial that this doesn’t go to some private bidding process as that would simply be another avenue for money to flow out of town and for corners to be cut. Perhaps 12-15 workers demoing one house at a time, pulling the steel, copper, wood and any valuable architectural features out for reuse and sale. A team heavy equipment operators and truckers to demolish the super structures and truck them off to a designated landfill on the fringe of the city limits. All these are jobs for locals and a potential income opportunity for the city.
It will create valuable green areas that could eventually be transformed into parkland or nature preserves creating a possible tourist destination is better times.
Families moving from demolished neighborhoods to nicer neighborhoods where homes need to be preserved, repaired and maintained could improve those areas. A formerly affluent area with historic properties suffer when homes lie vacant too as do the surrounding businesses, moving people to fill those area’s up has benefits.
Shrinking the area covered by essential city services has it’s obvious fiscal benefits and will improve the quality of those services. Roads and sidewalks aren’t going to be rebuilt to serve a neighborhood with 50% occupancy, but they will if that neighborhood bumps up to 90% occupancy. Having clarity on where limited resources should be spent will allow for better budgeting and planning. It’s not just that it’s cheaper to pull garbage from fewer homes and plow fewer streets, it makes things more predictable.
New businesses could be attracted to the newly condensed areas. As it stands small businesses in the food and service industries aren’t going to invest in the town. Not because there aren’t enough people or enough money, but because they are too spread out and impossible to target and market to. A city of 50,000 is a very good customer base if the business is confident that traffic and customers will be able to find them.
If the people who need to be displaced and the neighborhoods accepting those people get over the fear of change, prejudice and sentimentality this could be a boon for everyone. Perhaps giving those folks whose homes are being leveled first shot at the jobs created will soften that blow. Assuring the newly settled neighborhoods new and improved services might convince them.
Any and all resistance to this idea is pure selfishness and shortsightedness.
And leave the policing up to them as well, since the locals can’t afford it, and then a robotic cop appear on the scene and save the day. Always a pleasure to spot another Verhoeven fan 