Can the city of Detroit survive?

[AztecWilliam]

I was using Google Maps satellite view option to survey various areas of Detroit and Highland Park, Michigan. Indeed, it appears that there are many blocks in which a third, a half, even more than half of the houses have been torn down. Grass has taken over where once stood two storey dwellings. Some of the remaining houses look in bad shape, too. (It's not all that bad everywhere, of course.)

Question: how can this city (and other cities such as Highland Park) survive? As someone has said, you could probably graze cattle in many parts of Detroit.

I am curious to hear comments from any Aztec fans who are familiar with Detroit. This city (first half of the 20th Century) used to be called the city of the future. Now it looks like the cattle ranch of the future.

AzWm

[Frantic]

I was born in Detroit and my parents were both born and raised there. You're right William about what Detroit used to be; it was a vibrant city that was the hub of post-war industry and activity.

My dad was in his late teens in Detroit in the early 60's. He's always said the movie American Grafitti was the most accurate depiction of what it was like to grow up in Detroit. It really was the quintessential American town.

Sadly, Detroit deteriorated for many reasons that don't really matter - except to say that union jobs left town and racial tensions have always been high. I was born during the 1967 riots - my parents drove to the hospital a 8:00 a.m. during martial-law curfew afraid of being shot at by both the rioters and the cops. My parents moved to San Diego soon thereafter.

It's still a very large city, but unemployment, crime, a deteriorated infrastructure, and a corrupt local government has lead to steady flight to the burbs by anyone with a job or a brain.

So yes I believe Detroit is dead. It's too far gone to convince investment in the area. And it's so sad.

[Bob Forsythe]

When I was waiting for my thesis chairman to come back from one of his occasional sabbaticals to Berzerkly, when he was working on a book, I took a class in San Diego urban geography. That would have been around '78 or '79. At the time, he stated that there were around a half million abandoned housing units in St. Louis.

Urban problems in the Rust Belt are very complicated and not something I'm willing to go into at this moment (or maybe ever), but it goes back to a lot of things, most of them having to do with corporations that have moved south, along with Japanese car manufacturing that located in the south in order to take advantage of right to work laws that bust the unions.

But, of course, the problem with that is the companies outside the car factories who moved to the south, such as furniture and clothing manufacturing, have now moved to the 3^rd world and have now stolen the jobs away from them just as they stole them away from the Northeast and the Mid-West back in the day.

That's the capitalist model. They advocated for Taft-Hartley and had no problem with the "yanquis" losing jobs in favor of their states, but now that most manufacturing has moved to Central America, China and Vietnam they want to complain.

To a certain degree, I am a "small l" libertarian. I see no reason why anyone should complain about jobs being shipped overseas when they saw no reason to worry about what happened to all those manufacturing jobs that were lost in New England states back in the late '40s and the '50s.

I'm sure the conservatives on here would love to claim it's all the fault of the unions, but there ain't no unions in the South - the jobs, outside of the auto industry, have gone away because countries offering what amounts to slave labor, offers them a better return.

=Bob

[aztecwin]

I have driven around Detroit while in Windsor across the river on business. It is shocking to see such neglect. In my view, it would take a major miracle to rescue.

I don't have all the answers about how it got that way, one major problem is with the automakers not recognizing the kind of problem that Japanese cars would become.

[Bob Forsythe]

Aug 14, 2010 19:30:26 GMT -8 aztecwin said:

I have driven around Detroit while in Windsor across the river on business. It is shocking to see such neglect. In my view, it would take a major miracle to rescue.

I don't have all the answers about how it got that way, one major problem is with the automakers not recognizing the kind of problem that Japanese cars would become.

Can't disagree. They held on for too long to the old stereotype toward things "Made in Japan" and never saw the threat coming.

=Bob