WTF is wrong with Detroit?

[AngryAmish]

"One dollar can get you a large soda at McDonald's, a used VHS movie at 7-Eleven or a house in Detroit.

The fact that a home on the city's east side was listed for $1 recently shows how depressed the real estate market has become in one of America's poorest big cities" snip

"The buyer, a local woman, considers the home to be an investment property and will not live there, Colpaert said, though exactly how soon the buyer can expect to recoup her four-quarter investment is questionable. Replacing the guts of the house will costs tens of thousands of dollars, and the owner will have trouble keeping scrappers from stealing the improvements as quickly as they're installed. Home demolition costs about $5,000, Colpaert said."

I bash Detroit a lot because things are so screwed up there. The house goes empty and in days the siding, gutters, wiring, sinks etc. are gone. Why are there so many thieves in Detroit?

Chicago is plenty screwed up - God I know. But nowhere do people do this to houses. Houses get bad and the city knocks them down. Why can't they do that in Detroit?

[billyoc]

1. $1 for a house is still a ripoff.

I'll take the soda.

[angstlessk]

2. If you want to see a real disgrace, check out Cleveland OH

we just purchased a home in Detroit and it was not stripped..but finding one in Cleveland would be next to impossible. In fact you could purchase it today in Cleveland and by the time you go to closing it could be stripped of all value. Even NOW had a report on Cleveland.

[phantom power]

3. Theft is what happens when people become poor.

The best crime deterrent in the world is a healthy economy.

[rubberducky]

4. Desperate people do desperate things.

Feeding, clothing, and sheltering your family takes precidence over everything. I guess, you would have to live here to understand. This is city that is dying, it`s poorest people know that there is no way out. Detroit has sucked the life out of it`s middle and poverty classes. This city keeps building monuments to "the motor city". It`s a myth. If "they" are stripping forclosed homes for anything "valuable", "they" may be just trying to survive.

[noamnety]

5. We can't do that in Detroit because we haven't got the budget for it.

And the problem exists as the legacy of the ugliness of racism. When people started to move out of the city, we had laws in place to prevent black people from moving into the suburbs. FHA loans could ONLY be approved in white-only neighborhoods.

To prove some of the neighborhoods were white only so loans would be approved, a 6 foot tall wall was built around some of the black neighborhoods to contain the black people so they wouldn't get out and contaminate the white areas. (I hope that sounds as offensive as the actual policy was - I don't want to sugar coat that at all.

As the area got more and more segregated, more white people left the area - it was a self-perpetuating cycle. And even when the loan situation was changed, unspoken rules - and police harassment and hate crimes - enforced the segregation, and still do today.

In 1940, we had 1.6 million people in Detroit. Now there is less than a million. The city hasn't got funds to spend knocking down 600,000 vacant houses/apartments, when that comes at the expense of providing real services to people who need them.

I'm surprised if you've be "bashing Detroit a lot" that you haven't already found the answer to this question: Why are there so many thieves in Detroit? It's not too hard to discover the history and dynamics of racism here or anywhere else in the country - unless you don't WANT to see it. Black people are forbidden to live in upscale suburbs. Upscale suburbs draw high income residents. Black people end up confined to poverty stricken areas, which in turn become moreso.

Here's a factoid for you: The wealthiest 10 percent of school districts in the United States spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest 10 percent. Hmmm, think that affects the next generation's educational options? Michigan has redone its tax structure, but that doesn't undo a legacy of schools built with one tenth the resources of other schools. We now give a detroit school and a school in bloomfield hills the same funding per student, and we pretend that's not racist. We pretend it's equitable. But that doesn't address that the Detroit schools are having to pay the maintenance costs for a building that's been slowly collapsing for lack of funds for the last few decades - and having to pay part of the school budget toward police cars so the cops can patrol the neighborhoods when kids walk to school, while the schools in Bloomfield Hills can spend that same money on field trips or lab equipment.

The Detroit News found that racism is still alive and well in this area: ""Some employers still "steer" minority applicants into the worst jobs; real estate agents send them to less desirable neighborhoods and mortgage lenders accept fewer applications than those from similar whites."

When people ask why Detroit has so many problems, there's a part of me that hears the question this way: "I don't get it. Why is racism so bad for people?"