Poor Detroit

[beeline]

Well now I am thoroughly depressed.

[brekin]

The Slaughter of Cities
by E. Michael Jones

http://www.culturewars.com/Slaughter%20 ... 0flyer.pdf

Innunumerable books have been written decrying the
devastating impact that urban renewal has wrought upon the
cities and lives of city-dwellers in the East and Midwest from
the 1930s through the 1970s. But now, at last, someone has
written why this happened.

In The Slaughter of Cities, E. Michael Jones shows that what
began as the World War II intelligence community’s attempt to
solve America's “nationalities problem” and provide workers
for the nation's war industries degenerated by the early postwar
period into full-blown ethnic cleansing.

In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban
renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to do
with design or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the lastgasp
attempt of the WASP ruling class to take control of a
country that was slipping out of its grasp for demographic
reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be driven out of
their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to be
“Americanized” according to WASP principles. The
neighborhoods they left behind were to be turned over to the
sharecroppers from the South or turned into futuristic
Bauhaus enclaves for the new government elites. Using
political tactics like eminent domain and “integration,” the
planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood got
transformed into something more congenial to their dreams of
social engineering than the actual communities of people they
saw as a threat to their control.

Jones concentrates on four cities – Philadelphia, Chicago,
Detroit, and Boston – in a book whose conclusions will be
shocking and controversial. The destruction of the ethnic
neighborhoods that made up the human, residential heart of
these cities was not an unfortunate by-product of a wellintentioned
plan that somehow went awry; it was part of the
plan itself.

[beeline]

Thanks for the tip brekin, I'm going to have to read that book. That's related to what I do professionally.

The most obvious tactics were redlining and blockbusting. My old neighborhood was renowned for opposing these maneuvers and is today one of the most racially integrated neighborhoods in the U.S.:

http://www.wman.net/history.htm

[brekin]

beeline wrote:

Thanks for the tip brekin, I'm going to have to read that book. That's related to what I do professionally.

The most obvious tactics were redlining and blockbusting. My old neighborhood was renowned for opposing these maneuvers and is today one of the most racially integrated neighborhoods in the U.S.:

http://www.wman.net/history.htm

Interesting neighborhood, never had heard about it.

Another related book that you've probably already read is Robert Caro's The Power Broker.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 biography of Robert Moses, "New York City's Master Builder", by Robert Caro. In the years since its publication, and especially since Moses's death in 1981, it has been central to discussion of Moses and the history of 20th-century New York.

Overview
Caro traces Moses's life from his childhood in Gay Nineties Connecticut to his early years as an idealistic advocate for Progressive reform of the city's corrupt civil service system. Moses's failures there, and later experience working for future governor of New York Al Smith in the New York State Assembly and future New York mayor Jimmy Walker in the State Senate, taught him how power really worked, that he needed it to make his dreams of roads and bridges for the city reality, and that ideals and principles had to be set aside if necessary to make them happen, Caro says.

By the 1930s, he had earned a reputation as a creator of beautiful parks in both the city and state, and later long-sought projects like the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, but at the price of his earlier integrity. Caro ultimately paints a portrait of Moses as an unelected bureaucrat who, through his reputation for getting large construction projects done, amassed so much power over the years that the many elected officials whom he was supposedly responsive to instead became dependent on him. He consistently favored automobile traffic over human and community needs, and while making a big deal of the fact that he served in his many public jobs (save as New York City Parks Commissioner) without compensation, lived like a king and similarly enriched those individuals in public and private life who aided him.

While Caro pays ample tribute to Moses's intelligence, political shrewdness, eloquence and hands-on, if somewhat aggressive, management style, and indeed gives full credit to Moses for his earlier achievements, it is clear from the book's introduction onward that Caro's view of Moses is ambivalent (some of the readers of The Power Broker would conclude that Caro possessed only contempt for his subject).

At 1336 pages (reputedly edited from a manuscript three times that length), it provides documentation of its assertions in most instances, which Moses (and his supporters after his death) have consistently attempted to refute. Because Caro's narrative includes a great deal of history about New York City itself, the book is considered by many to be a monumental scholarly work in its own right, transcending the normal style of a biography that focuses on the life of a single person.

[chiggerbit]

Holy shit! The very first one I posted, the one for $10,000?
http://www.trulia.com/property/photos/1 ... t-MI-48215

I had checked out the maps provided, and it looked like a really sweet deal, near the waterfront, with lots of parks, etc. Then I used Google Earth, instead, and found that down there in Alfred Ford park on the waterfront, three blocks away, had at one time been a Nike nuke silo. Cripes, they put that one awfully close to a heavily populated area, didn't they?

I know there were at least a couple around the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and the one to the north at St. Francis has been housing a center for troubled teens, so you'd THINK they've been tested with a Geiger counter or something, but I don't trust the government to be truthful about those kinds of things. At least the St. Francis one hadn't been all that populated back when that was a working silo. Ick!

[OP ED]

Yikes, $5800! Does being near the river make it a bad neighborhood?

mostly yes.

[chiggerbit]

What a shame! It looks lke a beautiful house.

[Nordic]

On the flip side of all this, I was just reading last night about how artists are flocking to Detroit and buying these houses and creating co-ops and entire new neighborhoods where "Green" rules and a whole new system is being born.

I can't find where I was reading this now .....

Maybe I should quit deleting my history all the time ...

It sounded very cool. I remember when I as living in Denver back in the mid 80's, after the economy there had crashed, and you could get an apartment for $200 a month. There were tons of artists who had moved there and it was a pretty interesting scene.

[Nordic]

And, along those lines, check this out:

http://www.landliving.com/articles/0000000995.aspx

What some artists are up to:

[chiggerbit]

Interesting article and even more interesting comments, Nordic.

[barracuda]

Anyone have information on the property taxes in Detroit? I keep hearing that they're an impediment to purchase of these beautiful houses, but I can't find any good info online. How high are they? I mean, how much property tax could there be on a five thousand dollar house?

[chiggerbit]

I think it depends, cuda. I'm assuming there's a big difference between homestead and non-homestead. If you're planning on renting the property out, it's non-homestead, and I imagine the taxes are considerably more. I've seen something about "winter taxes" and "summer taxes", but I have no clue what that means, except to guess that it's a snowbird kind of tax,. I think it was one of the $13,000 properties that the tax was something like $3500. I'll edit to add that that the lister for that particular property had given the sales history for it. It had been sold a couple of times in the last few years, and one of those times it sold for about $150,000,--like in the last six years or less, if I remember right.

[chiggerbit]

Also, consider what the utilites histories are if you're planning to live there yourself. I think a lot of those brick houses aren't insulated, for instance, just guessing by their age. I think the utility companies will give that info out.

[chiggerbit]

Also, I don't think it matters what the house is selling for, it's what the city has appraised it at.

[chiggerbit]

$1,250

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhom ... 1105198327

Editing to add that it looks like that's a train track at the back side of the property, not counting the cemetery behind. If the tracks are active, that would bother me.