Black & white photos from Detroit's golden-years.

Defunct Packard Motors plant now in ruins.

It'll make you cry looking at what we've lost. If you look at pictures of Hiroshima or Dresden or Stalingrad from immediately after World War II and at pictures of Detroit, St. Louis, Gary IN, from the same time period (and the rest of our industrial midland cities from the same time too) and compare them to what they look like today. Except for the war memorials Hiroshima, Dresden, and Volgograd (nee Stalingrad) are now totally rebuilt modern cities and Detroit, Gary, and the rest of the America's industrial Heartland cities are in ruins.You'd think the Nazis and Imperial Japanese had won the war. Just like always America wins the war but loses the peace. [Business Insider]

The Dark Ages to return in Detroit?

Detroit maybe going dark. In order to save on replacement and energy costs the city of Detroit may not  repair the 40 percent of its streetlights that don't work currently and may shut off many others that do. It looks like we're moving back into the dark. That's the proposal anyhow. [Bloomberg]

A lefty academic tries to explain why Americans don't riot more

To be fair I have not read professor Katz's book but the reviews of it from the left-leaning pundits in the mainstream media sound almost wistful about the lack of rioting in America. I wonder why? Cui bono? Katz explains his motivation for the book in an interview podcast which you can listen to here.

Detropia

I find it is really odd how a certain type of white ex-Detroiter relishes the opportunity to masochistically chronicle the death, decay, and dismantlement of a once great city on film. But on the other hand such displays can get you noticed at the Sundance film festival and by the Huffington Post so there's that. Turn the camera around and speak into the microphone Ms. Ewing* and tell why you left Detroit?

*(Detropia's co-director Heidi Ewing is from Farmington Hills)

"Detroit is Ground Zero for the breakdown of the Blue Social Model."

Says Walter Russell Mead. "The race issue is a red herring", Mead goes on to say, "when it comes to Detroit.  Detroit isn’t broke because it has an African American majority; it is broke because for decades its politicians have spent more money than they had, and because Detroit never figured out how to reinvent itself as it lost its industrial core."

Well that and auto union greed and short-sightedness, a national government hell-bent on destroying the manufacturing economy in favor of financialism, and the obtuse, incompetent, corrupt, African-American "elite" (such as they are) that have run Detroit since 1973.

Going, going, gone.

Pontiac's state-appointed  Emergency Financial Manager plans to sell off every bit of the city's property possible at auction in order to pay its bills. Sad.

The truth about the "revitalizing the cities" hype

From the New Geography blog on the "Let's-move-back-to-the-city!" hype now currently in vogue: "Most [large] cities are either far too expensive or too lousy to even be a option for most middle class families (still the number 1 buyer of houses)."

The author here is talking about the meme being put out by some that posits that because some trustafarians and childless yuppsters are moving back to the urban core cities and are loving it that there must be a major demographic trend at work. But then again with their means they'd love living just about anywhere, no?  So in that sense it really is "all about the Benjamins".

Some aspects of this this phenomenon seem to apply to my hometown of Ann Arbor. A lot of folks who don't actually need to live in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor live or relocate to Ypsilanti or Pittsfield Township for the lower cost of living there or to Dexter or Scio Township if they have higher incomes. On the other hand there are also the old-timer hold outs (like me) and the folks that just like PRAA enough that they'll put up with the high taxes and the closed-off political system or in fact actively benefit from it. (And you guys know who you are.)

Gentrification on a very small scale doesn't prove anything. You can't build a large sized and thriving urban core with such a small albeit prosperous base.
*

Does Detroit needs martial law?

Unbelievable. The Detroit News reports today that from Friday morning until Sunday morning (a 24 hour period) 15 people were shot and six died in Detroit's neighborhoods. Martial law is about all that's left to the state government to reign in all the violence and I don't see that happening. Not yet anyhow.

Sign of the times...cont'd.

How Detroiters handle neighborhood problems these days - DetFP

"[DFD]...said the home on the 5900 block of Manistique was in [the] middle of three homes firebombed late Wednesday. Broadcast reports said neighbors of the couple may have been targeted because of an ongoing feud in which the husband and wife weren’t involved." 

Speaking of a husband who died saving his wife when their home was firebombed. What makes this story "newsworthy" isn't the death and injury involved but the serial arson aspect. If the perp/s had used an AK-47 to spray the homes with bullets it would just be another news story of senseless violence and death from Detroit.

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Detroit as an Urban Laboratory: More think-tank style noodling about turning Detroit into several smaller villages with big green "opportunity zones" in between. Maybe. But they'd have to get the SoM and City Hall and all their bullshit out of the way first.

Sign of the times...

A news story out of Ypsilanti caught my eye. Three guys ambushed a female security guard at the Maplewood Apartment complex on Chestnut & Huron River Drive next door to EMU's Rynearson stadium. They choked her unconscious with a chord. The story has a somewhat happy ending in that she wasn't raped or killed. The perps are still at large.

Twenty years ago my grandmother lived at Maplewood as did numerous other elderly singles and low income families. Around the same time and newly married, me and my young family lived there in the early 90's. It sure wasn't like that then. Sign of the times....

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“Free Market Capitalism” is an Oxymoron - Kevin Carson (C4SS)

"The state played a central role in creating the defining characteristic of capitalism as we know it: the wage system. Had free markets been allowed to develop peacefully, with the peasant majorities remaining in control of their land and with free access to the means of subsistence, labor markets would likely have taken a much different form. Employers would have had to compete with the possibility of self-employment, available to the vast majority of the population. But thanks to Enclosures and similar land expropriations over a period of several centuries, the majority of the population was turned into a landless proletariat totally dependant on wage labor for its subsistence."

Flint, Michigan's Best Hope? Bulldoze most of the city - Slate (Gordon Young)

"First, he says, shrinking cities must accept that they're not going to regain their lost populations anytime soon. Abandoned houses and buildings should be leveled and replaced with parks, urban gardens, and green space. Eventually, incentives can be used to lure residents into higher density neighborhoods that have been reinvigorated with infill housing and rehab projects. While there are no hard numbers, local governments could save money by reducing infrastructure costs, and the housing market would stabilize, if not improve." Progress? Sounds more like triage.

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The great migration back to the city some urbanologists predicted hasn't happened - New Geography (Joel Kotkin)
"Friends of Israel Defense Forces," a so-called charity, is having fundraisers in LA? - iSteve
How is this even legal? If a "Friends of Hamas" fundraiser in LA were proposed, the feds would be all over it.

Sign of the times

There was a joke going around soon after the release of the famous Rodney King beating video that the cop unions next big political push was to impose a background check and a 15-day waiting period on the purchasers of all video recording devices. (Heh! Although sadly, that actually is starting to happen, albeit in a slow boiling-frog sort of way.) And now, to keep current, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing has instituted a ban on news crew cameramen accompanying police on raids. Given that an A&E channel film crew for the TV show The Next 48 (a cop based reality show) was alongside police when one of the DPD's raiders accidentally blew the head off of a seven year girl and the video from that raid is being used in a lawsuit against the city, the mayor now wants to be sure that this kind of thing never happens again. And so it won't; the next time DPD accidentally kills someone there won't be any video of it. That's what passes for progress in Detroit in these times.