Detroit from the air - city growth

[dieseltaylor]

Very short article. Very interesting 4 pictures. Warning contains poor spelling.

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazing-before-and-after-pictures-of-detroit-2009-10

[Angus]

Is this Detroit or Pripyat?

http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/schools-out-forever-625.php

[dieseltaylor]

It is very disturbing to see how far Detroit has collapsed. Shows what corruption can really do if left unchecked for so long.

[Stalins Organ]

What corruption are you referring to?

I dont' se anything "corrupt" (in the sense of rotting away rather than graft) about population shift leading to empty land.

the section sizes around those houses in the 4th shot are not unusual in New Zealand - the narrow/tall construction of the remaining buildings highlights just how dense the population must have been there.

[MeatEtr]

Sure it has it's problems, but it's not like it's completely collapsed or anything. I was just up there visiting relatives a few weeks ago. Besides, they still got a great Wings team up there.

[Brian Smith]

"Wild animal citings" - they are usually terrible at using footnotes and such.

[dieseltaylor]

Detroit is terribly corrupt in government - I read the Detroit Free Press about once a week on average and it is very sad to see a city collapsing so badly.

http://michiganmessenger.com/28476/race-dynamic-seen-as-obstacle-in-detroit-urban-farming

Dig the writers name : )

[dieseltaylor]

Possibly a biased view .........

In 1961, the last Republican mayor of Detroit lost his re-election bid to a young, intelligent Democrat, with the overwhelming support of newly organized black voters. His name was Jerome Cavanagh. The incumbent was widely considered to be corrupt (and later served 10 years in prison for tax evasion). Cavanagh, a white man, pandered to poor underclass black voters. He marched with Martin Luther King down the streets of Detroit in 1963. (Of course, marching with King was the right thing to do... It's just Cavanagh's motives were political not moral.) He instated aggressive affirmative action policies at City Hall. And most critically, he greatly expanded the role of the government in Detroit, taking advantage of President Lyndon Johnson's "Model Cities Program" – the first great experiment in centralized urban planning.

Mayor Cavanagh was the only elected official to serve on Johnson's task force. And Detroit received widespread acclaim for its leadership in the program, which attempted to turn a nine-square-mile section of the city (with 134,000 inhabitants) into a "model city." More than $400 million was spent trying to turn inner cities into shining new monuments to government planning. In short, the feds and Democratic city mayors were soon telling people where to live, what to build, and what businesses to open or close. In return, the people received cash, training, education, and health care.

The Model Cities program was a disaster for Detroit. But it did accomplish its real goal: The creation of a state-supported, Democratic political power base. The program also resulted in much higher taxes – which were easy to pitch to poor voters who didn't have to pay them. Cavanagh pushed a new income tax through the state legislature and a "commuter tax" on city workers.

Unfortunately, as with all socialist programs, lots of folks simply don't like being told what to do. Lots of folks don't like being plundered by the government. They don't like losing their jobs because of their race.

In Detroit, they didn't like paying new, large taxes to fund a largely black and Democratic political hegemony. And so, in 1966, more than 22,000 middle- and upper-class residents moved out of the city.

But what about the poor? As my friend Doug Casey likes to say, in the War on Poverty, the poor lost the most. In July 1967, police attempted to break up a late-night party in the middle of the new "Model City." The scene turned into the worst race riot of the 1960s. The violence killed more than 40 people and left more than 5,000 people homeless. One of the first stores to be looted was the black-owned pharmacy. The largest black-owned clothing store in the city was also burned to the ground. Cavanagh did nothing to stop the riots, fearing a large police presence would make matters worse. Five days later, Johnson sent in two divisions of paratroopers to put down the insurrection. Over the next 18 months, an additional 140,000 upper- and middle-class residents – almost all of them white – left the city.

And so, you might rightfully ask... after five years of centralized planning, higher taxes, and a fleeing population, what did the government decide to do with its grand experiment, its "Model City"? You'll never guess....

Seeing it had accomplished nothing but failure, the government endeavored to do still more. The Model City program was expanded and enlarged by 1974's Community Development Block Grant Program. Here again, politicians would decide which groups (and even individuals) would receive state funds for various "renewal" schemes. Later, Big Business was brought into the fold. In exchange for various concessions, the Big Three automakers "gave" $488 million to the city for use in still more redevelopment schemes in the mid-1990s.

What happened? Even with all of their power and all of the money, centralized planners couldn't succeed with any of their plans. Nearly all of the upper and middle class left Detroit. The poor fled, too. The Model City area lost 63% of its population and 45% of its housing units from the inception of the program through 1990.

Even today, the crisis continues. At a recent auction of nearly 9,000 seized homes and lots, less than one-fifth of the available properties sold, even with bidding starting at $500. You literally can't give away most of the "Model City" areas today. The properties put up for sale last week represented an area the size of New York's Central Park. Total vacant land in Detroit now occupies an area the size of Boston – Detroit properties in foreclosure have more than tripled since 2007.

Every single mayor of Detroit since 1961 has been a Democrat. Every single mayor of Detroit since 1974 has been black. Detroit has been a major recipient of every major social program since the early 1960s and has received hundreds of billions of dollars in government grants, loans, and programs. We now have a black, Democrat president, who is promising to do to America as a whole what his political mentors have done to Detroit.

Those of you with a Democratic political affiliation may think what I've written above is biased or false. You may think what you like. But there is no way to argue that what the government has done to Detroit is anything but a horrendous crime. You may think what I've written above is merely a political analysis. Perhaps so, but politicians drive macroeconomic policy. And macroeconomic policy determines key financial metrics, like the trade-weighted value of a currency and key interest rates.

http://www.thedailycrux.com/content/3247/Government_Stupidity

[Stalins Organ]

Yeah 'cos only socialists make screw ups in macroeconomic policy. thank god we had Republicans looking afte the ship until 2008 or there might have been some problems all right.......

God I get sick of the pathetic left and right basing....but mostly from the USA it seems to be left bashing.....as if the capitalist system hasn't killed millions or driven more millions to unemployment or poverty.

"Fact" is that communism fails, and capitalism fails too.......the USA is one of the most socialist econom ies in the world ifyou measure wealth redistribution to farmers & industry (in the form of tarrifs, subsidies, etc) - and the US taxpayer & world-wide consumer and farmer is who is paying for it.

The right wingers "here" only ever complain about "wealth redistribution" when it is redistributing it to someone other than their perceived interest/industry groups....when was the last time one of htem complained about price support for US farmers?

What a bunch of one-eyed hypocrites!

[costard]

OK, time for some defining creeds:

Capitalism - To each according to his ability.

Communism - To each according to his need.

Socialism - He who does not work, neither does he eat.

These are the defining creeds as they were coined at the time of the creation of the political movements - the revisionist hysteries of the past two decades have done nothing for the debate.

[Stalins Organ]

Capitalism had no such creed AFAIK, because it was not an "invented" system that someone wrote the rules for.

IMO it was and remains the golden rule - who has the capital (gold) makes the rules, and if you don't have any then you take what is on offer or lump it.