What happened to Detroit?

Yea? What did happen to Detroit?

The same thing that is going on for the most part, in the rest of the world, what the hay?

Place blame no where, but blame everywhere, it's all about greed.

Now we approach The age of Truth. So look out, it'e coming, we wanted it, now it comes.

It' time to get work, even if you don't.

Q: 'What happened to Detroit?"
A:

Look, how many times have great cities of the been built over above an existing city?

For the most part they just build on top of old cities.

reply to post by DeadSeraph


I did notice it was spelled incorrectly - so I guess it shows that someone with dyslexia understands history and sees the writing on the wall!

pavil
Dertoit like others cities, was a one trick pony. They never thought to diversify from the automotive industry. Once that pony started dying, there was no stopping the decay and rot. Add horrible governance and entitlment behavior ontop of that and you have Detroit. Any region that doesn't diversify its economy will suffer the same fate.

Detroit started with the salt mines.

It ain't over yet, either. The entertainment industry is setting up shop out here. Movies are being made regularly and that means extra jobs. I know quite a few people getting in on this action.

Also, music. Detroit has one of the richest music scenes in the country.

She is not dying, she is merely getting dressed.

Detroit got too big for its britches.

You had one big industry that fueled it. That one industry was infested with a union that steadily demanded more in wages and benefits, including pensions, that eventually bankrupted the industry when other countries started their own, more competitive versions of the same industry.

You had a city government that steadily taxed that industry cash cow and resulting wealthy citizenry into the ground to pay for services fueled by city workers who also got overly generous wages and benefits, including pensions, that eventually bankrupted it as people steadily moved away to avoid the taxation leaving behind only those who could either absorb the hit or could not escape steadily breeding all sorts of social problems fueling even more flight.

Oh, and then the businesses starting leaving or outright dying for the same reasons as the people were leaving.

Pretty soon, no one could meet their ill-conceived financial promises, and it all went under.

Now, I have no problem with the idea of workers banding together to avoid being taken advantage of, but let's be realistic - is a forklift driver worth $30/hour + another $30/hour in benefits? because that's what UAW forklift drivers can often pull down contractually. By the time an entire workforce of such workers are paid for AND they are making their legacy obligation to retired employees AND the big three price to compete with the non-union Japanese companies, they were only making maybe $2,000/car in some cases which didn't leave enough in overhead to run the company.

Oh, and when GM and Chevy went bankrupt and the government bailed them? They were forced to continue their legacy union obligations, but white collar pensions were cut leaving those former employees high and dry.

But it's examples of mismanagement like this all throughout Detroit's structure that make it rotten to the core. Did you know that Detroit buys it's library janitors business cards? This is a city where up to 47% of the population is functionally illiterate ... And this is not confined to just Detroit. This sort of epic failure is rampant across America. Atlanta is cumbling in the same way. Her own suburbs are disincorporating from her, and the city is suing them for racism of all things because they are doing it. When suburbs are leaving a city, you know there is trouble.

reply to post by ExPatRat


Detroit was a industrial monoculture that failed to adapt to a changing world. That’s not unique, many cities were also dependant on one industry for their prosperity. What makes Detroit the poster boy for decline is poor political leadership marked by rampant corruption refused to adapt to a changing landscape.

reply to post by Maluhia


Rome fell because of its open-border policy; the ones they were fighting just voted against Rome's policies.

applesthateatpeople

pavil
Dertoit like others cities, was a one trick pony. They never thought to diversify from the automotive industry. Once that pony started dying, there was no stopping the decay and rot. Add horrible governance and entitlment behavior ontop of that and you have Detroit. Any region that doesn't diversify its economy will suffer the same fate.

Detroit started with the salt mines.

It ain't over yet, either. The entertainment industry is setting up shop out here. Movies are being made regularly and that means extra jobs. I know quite a few people getting in on this action.

Also, music. Detroit has one of the richest music scenes in the country.

She is not dying, she is merely getting dressed.

I admire your hope......

Detroit as a major City is gone. It will be just a City within a Tri County Area. It will no longer be the central hub where everything happens. Movies will not be a major industry. Hopefully I will be proved wrong, but the problem is overwhelming to fix without a MASSIVE influx of money. That isn't going to happen.

All the young professionals who have moved there with the incentives their businesses have offered will not be staying there once they have kids of school age. The Detroit School system is a joke and there really aren't viable private ones even.

You need to restructure Detroit from the ground up and there just isn't enough money to make that happen. Vast areas of the City's footprint just have to be open land. Please don't give me that "urban farming" idea. Detroit will survive, but not at a Major U.S. City. It's too far gone.

JBRiddle
One Word - Democrats

2 words...deny ignorance

A lot happened to Detroit.
An excellent history, although it doesn't go into the bankruptcy, as it was written a couple years ago:
Detr oit, a biography

Detroit reached its zenith in the 1950s...and has gone down hill since.
Progress was it's worst enemy.

If Detroit had addressed its problems a decade ago, I doubt it would have had to be in bankruptcy.
Plenty of blame for that. The Kilpatrick Administration, and it convicted corrupt Mayor Kwame, get me top vote. IF he and the then Governor Granholm would have instituted reform for pension and other areas, this could have been avoided.
If they paid their bills and lived within their means. Collected taxes and made citizens pay their water bills.


decline of Detroit
en.wikipedia.org...

history of Detroit
en.wikipedia.org...

What happened to Detroit?

Honda
Nissan
Toyota
Volkswagon

Oh and a thing called free trade.

Doc Gator
As a son of Detroit, and having watched the city decline from "the Paris of the West" into a war zone, the answer is both very simple and extremely complicated. But at it's base, it can be summed up by one phrase: Political Corruption. All of the other problems stem from that.

Exactly.
They ran rampant for so long, unchecked.

SirMike
reply to post by ExPatRat

 

Detroit was a industrial monoculture that failed to adapt to a changing world. That’s not unique, many cities were also dependant on one industry for their prosperity. What makes Detroit the poster boy for decline is poor political leadership marked by rampant corruption refused to adapt to a changing landscape.

I absolutely agree about that one industry dependence being common. It's a scary reality and kind of is explanatory for why very large corporations hold so much power within the US. Just about every city here has a primary/specific industry as its economic base. Seattle's core base would be Boeing and Weyerhauser. If something happened to either company, then Seattle would be strongly impacted. Portland has Intel as its largest employer/industry. Nike is also in the Portland metro area but Nike isn't about making shoes--they sell them. The only factory in Oregon that's connected to Nike is a shoebox factory. San Francisco's number one economic base is, oddly enough, the military with IT being second. What's LA's primary industry? Entertainment. How Las Vegas? Casinos.

The truth is that getting a big name in an industry to come set up shop within a particular city is really very hard. There's a whole lot of competition for it and the cities will bend over backwards trying to get them in. For Portland, they provided mass transit services and more to retain Intel's presence. You have entire neighborhoods, shopping and strip malls all built around what are basically called "Intel neighborhoods". Now what would happen if Intel left or went bankrupt and closed? It'd be disastrous...all those neighborhoods built up around Intel employees would suddenly lose their economic source.

What happened to Detroit can actually happen in almost any city within the US. You may have only 1-2 core industries in any given city that provide enough well paying jobs that they become the economic base for that city. My grandfather used to say "don't keep all your eggs in the same basket". Unfortunately, getting one industry into a city is hard enough. Getting two, really tough. So most cities in the US? They have all of their eggs in one basket. For Detroit, it was the automotive industry.

However, I disagree that it was necessarily that Detroit failed to adapt. Where Detroit failed was in maintaining their industry and the cause for that was probably both local government, federal trade agreements and failed decision making at the corporate level of those automotive industries themselves (Ford even admits that they messed up bigtime.). Most cities do not recover from the loss of their sole industry. Plenty of other factory towns and cities have fallen to the loss of their base. Flint, Michigan virtually died when GM left it just to name another. Or how about all those ghost towns in the West that built up around mining operations?

Two things happened to Detroit.

1. Reagan when he waged war on the UAW that really hurt Detroit. They marked him as Ronald Wilson Reagan 666 and actually cheered when they heard he had been shot.

2. The car companies themselves. It is bad business to keep building gas guzzling land yachts when the country has been going through a gas crisis for years.

True on the Ronald Regan he has pretty much managed to kill the country with TEAR DOWN THIS WALL. All good AMERICAN jobs went overseas for pennies on the dollar. If it's the unions fault just explain how the country was strong when the union was and how it's now so weak just like the union. The largest union is government workers and we see how good that's going

OOOOOO
Michigan , Detroit will rebound in time, they have just come to realize wes gots all the water.

The world is in the process of change, things will never be the way they were.

But as in Birth there is also pain in rebirth, the next time is to come.

The Water will always make Michigan, Great.

Water, winter, wonderland.

This may not appeal to some people but here's a documentary called Transformations about revivals which caused a significant drop in crime. Cali Columbia held prayer meetings in a soccer stadium and one by one local drug lords were captured. A small town in Guatemala that suffered heavily from alcoholism and crop failure closed all it's bars and turned them into churches and their crops started to grow so well they were producing over sized vegetables. There's even an American story about Hemet California which use to be the meth capital of California.




Can some one help me with the link. I don't know how to do it properly.

Transformations

reply to post by ExPatRat




"Transformations 1"

Published on Jun 18, 2012

This is an awesome documentary about how a whole City/Country of people can be radically transformed by The Power of The Gospel. May we each pay the price for this true kind of revival in our cities, countrries.

reply to post by xuenchen

Thanks Xuenchen!

Our former mayor "Swami-Kuami" did an "I dream of Genie" blink and stole all our money and contracts to give to his friends.