Detroit's horrifying collapse accelerating beyond belief

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: Krazysh0t

a reply to: Xtrozero



Detroit is the result of too much government intervention. There is a reason why they downplay what is happening there in the media. Because most Democratic cities will suffer the same fate if they continue on their course of more and more government regulation, with more and more taxes, and bigger and bigger governments.

Some facts



1.Detroit's population has plunged 63% since 1950.

2....and it's down 26% since 2000.

3.The unemployment rate hit a high of 27.8% in July 2009.

4.As of April 2013, the unemployment rate was at 16%.

5.Even though the population fell 63% since 1950, the municipal workforce fell by just 40%, adding to the strain on public finances.

6.Detroit has the highest violent crime rate of any large U.S. city

7....it's five times higher than the national average.

8.40% of the city's street lights don't work.

9.78,000 structures and 66,000 lots are abandoned.

10.Arson accounts for 1,000 of 12,000 fires per year.

11....60% of those arson fires are in dilapidated or empty buildings.





Welcome to a 99.99% liberal city....



I love one article that says Detroit workers lack "soft" skills, like showing up for work....lol

You really BOLDED #5 like it proved something? So for every 1% of population lost there should be 1% jobs gone? Which jobs?

And how would that thelp that UER you mentioned?

Dying to hear that...

Derek

a reply to: KarensHoliday
A LOT of neighborhoods now look like that in the City.
My old neighborhood where I grew up is just leveled, destroyed, demolished..........

That's what happens when half your population leaves and you never have any new housing ever being built in a meaningful way since the 1950's. The remaining houses and even the commercial properties are so dilapidated that they truly aren't worth renovating, even if they were given to you free.

The City has already had one major campaign to demolish buildings, you should have seen how those streets in those pictures looked prior to that first removal of burnt out houses. Those would have been even scarier photos. The City has earmarked 850 MILLION just to demolish more houses and commercial properties, that's how bad it is.
Link to article

Detroit is just WAY too big for it's remaining citizens and large areas just need to sit fallow till there is a demand for new housing or business properties. You are talking decades of vacant land, not producing tax revenue.

It's a pretty bleak scenario for the City of Detroit.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Part of the reason for this phenomena of "houses sitting and left to rot" is because the house price index dropped so precipitously after the financial crisis. It was the worst price decline that we've ever had and even surpassed the decline in home value during the Great Depression over decade. What this did to many homeowners, regardless of whether they had a bad mortgage or not, is it left millions of people "upside down" in their mortgages. Basically, upside down is where the market value of your home is underneath the original price of your mortgage. My best friend was upside down in her home by $20k and she counted herself lucky. Many got hit far worse than this and were as high as $150k upside down in their homes.

When the banks basically foreclosed upon millions of homes in the US, it created a secondary crisis. If all of those homes were immediately placed back onto the market, it would've cause home values to decline even further. Interestingly enough, it is not legal for banks to have these kind of properties on their books. By law, they must sell. However, the situation was extreme enough where the federal regulators intervened and made rulings and gave advice on how to handle this issue without further tanking the housing market. One of those plans was to sell the properties to third party investors as an investment instead of placing them on the market.

In that case, you'd never see a "for sale" sign sitting on a property because the exchange would've been off market. It could be that the bank no longer owns the property in question and it, instead, has a new owner sitting on the property for the purpose of speculation on the value of the land eventually rising. Kind of like those empty lots that one sees in downtown areas or even the ones that are covered in blacktop and are "pay to park". That is land speculation pre-financial crisis.

I don't know if they did the right thing or not personally. Just commenting on why homes just sat and went into decline without ever going back into the housing market. We had a bubble where a lot of people did buy homes in a regular way and those people were greatly affected. If the houses had just been placed back on the market, how much more upside down would they have become?

More on this subject: en.wikipedia.org...

heres the problem,,

850M divided by 85thousand houses,, $10,000.00 / house,,,seems high?

About a year ago Bordain did a CNN special on Detroit and in it the firemen said they have about 5000 fires in Detroit, most of which are arson to either get insurance fraud or by pissed off residents who are trying to demolish crack houses.

It was also coldly explained this is what happens when white people take factories and jobs and the middle class blacks also move out, leaving the poorest people to deal with the rest.

Detroit will come back but like all cities it will be cubicle housing and government subsidies regulated by 4 way stoplights and parasitic taxes on all goods with pot and indian casinos left to generate income.

Detroit is an example of how capitalism taken to the extreme and dictated by stock values comes up against rampant greed and short shortsightedness.

Don't worry. We can pay off all our inflated debts. All we have to do is tell china and all the other countries that we owe , to take land that was lost or foreclosed on for money in debt we owe to them. Wait, isn't this happening now? to our national wildlife areas. COME TOGETHER, RIGHT NOW. OVER HERE.

How much were these properties worth originally anyway... this doesnt seem like an expensive problem here... cutting a lawn and building a 50k building isnt a big deal.

White flight took away the biggest chunk of big tax payers there, and recently the black middle classes have been deserting it in droves, so they've got a complete economic collapse in process and most of their admin level brains have buggered off to safer pastures so there's no one competent left to run it either.

It says something that in a country rife with homelessness no-ones moving to Detroit to claim the abandoned properties.

a reply to: cosmikDebris

its called weather...and selecting the weather while making a photo to make more effect..

a reply to: jimmyx
Probably after they wreck everything and have no choice.

a reply to: KarensHoliday

A lot of this is due to vandals. They come in, strip the place for copper wire and anything else of value and just trash the place. That's not counting for all the dilapidation, but it isn't slowing it either.

I have no thoughts as to what to do with Detroit. It's a place that has so much automotive history with many great people still living there. It is a shame to see what's happening to it.

Not just in detroit either. This was due to we lost alot of jobs that went over seas. WHY? WHY pay health coverage insurance, building insurance,state, federal and local taxes and higher wages when a peoples are willing to work for pennies on the dollar. It's a NO BRAINER. You think some of these peoples just got booming financially over seas because they did it themselves. NO, they had help with american buisnesses going over seas and still going over seas. You have been sucked dry, sucker.

I lived in the burbs of Detroit from '60 to '74. I still remember the riots in '68 (and the world series) and what it did to the downtown area. Talk about 8 mile, holy cow. Eminem is too young to know, but that was certainly a line in the sand.

At one point, the outer areas (like Grosse Point) were some of the richest housing areas in the country, housing the execs from the auto industry. Wasn't hardly a job there that wasn't tied into auto industry in some way or another. Then the combination of corporate greed and union corruption took over. Unions were able to negotiate things like quotas, which were ridiculously low, so a lot of workers could finish their quota in 2 hours and sleep for 6. Corporate wasn't any better. I'll have to agree with previous poster who said government intrusion was the straw that broke the camel's back. It most definitely was. Unions had a good bargaining position and corporates probably could have offered a decent deal, but greed got the best of both. I worked for a while at a little Chinese restaurant that was about 3 or 4 blocks away from where Hoffa was taken. Too bad the same folks didn't take the CEO's of GM, Chrysler, and Ford.

Sounds like there's mostly abandonment of houses there, so there'd be no need for eminent domain to just bulldoze and make farms. That would actually be really cool. Or at least plant trees or something. Just because it's a wasteland doesn't mean it has to look like one.

I am from Detroit: My Parents grew up there, My Grandparents had beautiful homes there. We moved out in the 1960's to the Suburbs.
WHAT HAPPENED? Michigan is a Home-Rule State. That means that under the State Constitution, wide Constitutional Powers are given to the smallest form of local government. Under the Home-Rule Theory, all powers granted to the State in the Federal Constitution are then transferred to the smallest unit of local government, unless expressly reserved by the State Legislature. As opposed to Dillon's Rule States(the other 48 States), in which all those powers are retained by State Government unless expressly granted to local governments. There are three Home-Rule States in the world, Michigan, New Jersey, and The Republic of Ireland(all three governmental Hell-holes).
When Detroit was a boom-town, the Irish Mafias seized control of the City and got Michigan to adopt "Home Rule" as law. Detroit ate up smaller Cities and Townships around it as it grew, and the Detroit-Irish Political Machine got richer and more powerful than the whole rest of the State, getting even more laws passed to benefit them. They even had their own Court system apart from the rest of the State. Detroit was like it's own Country, The State could do nothing to intervene.
Taxes were high, property values were stable, crime was minimal. But Detroit was enormous, around 160 square miles.
Things were nominal until the 1967 Detroit Race-Riots occurred. Under the Civil Rights act, no longer could the Police enforce order for the Irish Machine with an Iron Fist. Under the "Great Society Programs" you could move to Detroit and live pretty well if you got on on welfare. Lots of Southerners moved to Detroit to do just that. It was the point when the mobs became to big for Detroit's Irish Machine/Police to maintain order anymore.
At that point anyone with any sense of reality realized they were living on the Titanic and moved out, the City then raised outrageous taxes, crime exploded, and businesses closed en-masse.
Detroit has been slowly sinking since then, what you see in the pictures is the result of a populace that can't read, is not-trainable for jobs, has no work ethic, and are extremely violent.
Michigan still can't do much for Detroit. There is no State "Investigating Authority" to oversee local government, and the F.B.I has basically washed its hands of prosecuting corruption. No sane person will ever invest there, no one who values there life will go there if they don't have to.
I know this is not the politically correct version you see on the TV/news, as it is the Big Elephant in the room that no one will talk about, but at least 1 person has now told you what the story is. Everyone talks about saving Detroit, never it's citizens or property owners. the City Detroit(the Municipal Body itself) must be killed off first before anything will ever improve. It will just keep getting worse.

a reply to: KarensHoliday

unemployed drug addicts are salvaging
and selling what ever they can steal.

Detroit is the physical example of whats going on with our society and government. Collapse and decay with some making money off it. When everything is in ruines and we're left with nothing, they'll " help" us restore things to how they feel they should be.

Showing houses and buildings that have burned down doesn't draw a parallel to an economic collapse.

a reply to: smithjustinb

Showing the houses is drawing the picture of reality as it exists in the Detroit area. It doesn't prove anything but it isn't being asked to. Anyone watching this for the last few years know the tragedy those pics show. A tragedy it is too....

Last I checked the national real estate inventory for Detroit? You could still get actual businesses with stock in them and NICE looking homes for pennies on the dollar. $10,000-$20,000 on some of it. Just give away prices...and it's heart breaking.

That was a center of American commerce and industry at one time..and by a whole combination of factors, it's now a monument to how far we could all still fall.

How ironic this thread is posted as we remember the D-day invasion.Why?Many of the armies tanks, jeeps and trucks were being mass produced in yup, Detroit.The city's contribution to the war effort was essential, imhp.