How to start a boom in Detroit ...in 4 easy steps

[SoCalDem]

For people with incomes less than 100K per year:

"buy down" their mortgages to the REAL value of their homes
set a new "hardship" interest rate on the loans to 2% (for 5 years..then increasing to 4% permanent rate)...only OWNER-OCCUPIED

offer people making 25-100K a year a FREE house to rehab @ 1% loan ..again. NO FLIPPERS

offer free commercial space for 3 years to entrepreneurs/artists to begin a business..along with 1% loans

create $15hr jobs to people to do the labor required to do the rehab work.

Eminent domain should allow most of these decrepit abandoned places to either be torn down or rehabbed.

None of these plans would be available to the multi-property owners or to the slumlord folks who let these places decay.

Only DEMAND can create business. You can open the best shop around, but if customers have NO MONEY to spend, you will fail.

[leftstreet]

1. Similar to the early Homestead Acts?

Interesting idea

DURec

[Socal31]

2. It sounds like investing with no chance for return.

I think that horse has left the barn. Everything you mention needs capital, and Detroit doesn't have it. If you "create" $15/hr jobs, it is a net loss to the economy. Any taxes paid on that would not be a net gain, and with that low of income you don't pay anything other than SS and sales tax anyway.

You say only demand can create business, but you cannot fabricate demand long-term.


Any money being invested needs to go to stop the cycle of poverty and encourage business to believe and invest in a once proud manufacturing city. New schools, more teachers, etc. After-school programs for at-risk youth. Alternatives to gangs and crime.

There are recent examples of cities doing a 180, and Detroit can do it too. I was in Atlanta a couple months ago, and I could not believe how it has changed for the better in the last 4-6 years. I read somewhere it was a wave of medical technology jobs, but I could be off. Whatever it is, it feels like a whole different place.

[FarCenter]

3. Similar things are happening

Young people are buying houses very cheaply and rehabbing them. The cost of the house and lot is not very much compared with materials and work.

Commercial spaces are available cheaply and new businesses are moving in. Again, the cost is no longer an issue because the rents are so low compared with elsewhere in MI.

These things aren't happening very fast though, and making houses and commercial spaces zero cost would not likely increase the pace much.