The President of Quicken Loans (too lazy to look up his name) is investing a lot of money in Detroit. Trying to spearhead a recovery of sorts. Downtown mostly. My niece works for him.

Every city has infrastructure. In square miles New York is twice the size of Detroit. I would venture a guess their infrastructure is four times as large as Detroit. It's all part of proper planning. New York had similar problems as Detroit in the late 60's into the 80's. Detroit failed to plan for decades maybe even a century. The problem is now compounded due to a lack of tax revenue.

I don't want to turn this into a PARF thread but, sorry Kach this is Democrat leadership at it's best. Philadelphia, Camden, NJ and Trenton, NJ and other cities aren't far behind.

Keep in mind US cities are barely 130 years old. Paris was founded in 52BC and London 50AD. Some how they keep managing to chug along.

The city has made numerous attempts at rejuvenating and/or repurposing major chunks of land that are former neighborhoods. One such effort was to create a ‘land bank’, wherein the city would allow the locals to plant gardens, create small parks, etc. on city land for pretty much at no charge. The city also contracted out the demolition of literally thousands upon thousands of abandoned homes and other structures.

A good idea and nice try.

The contracts were paid but the demolition was either shoddy or never happened. Legit contractors stayed away not trusting the city and many of the requirements for awarding the contracts had several, shall we say, restrictions.

Oh. The money is gone but the houses are still there.

It's an incredibly poorly run city in an incredibly poorly run state with terrible weather, rampant crime and poverty and tens of thousands on the dole. The governments taxed their residents and corporations out of existence and squandered the money on votes and bureaucracy instead of maintaining infrastructure. It's regularly named one of the worst cities in the US- if not the worst.

In fact it's so bad German car companies don't even go to the auto show and, reportedly, even Jesus hates Detroit.

So yeah snap up those lots. What could go wrong?

The good news is that the freeways have been resurfaced.
East-West M-14 and I-94 used to have potholes(tank traps) a foot deep. Literally.
Now it's easy to drive from Ann Arbor to downtown Detroit.

The bad news is that crackheads designed north-south US-23.
There are random super short passing lanes and random traffic lights guaranteed to confuse drivers and clog the freeway with merging accidents.

So if you have a good fence around your property, taxes are negotiated on paper and set in stone, are located on a major artery for utilities, don't talk to neighbors, and have a few dobermans in the yard, you should be all right there.

Please keep in mind what others have said about Detroit being "spread out", downtown living is almost an unknown archetype historically speaking.

Our "downtown" has always been primarily commercial/business with people living in single family homes (+duplexes/quads) outside of the commercial and industrial districts.

Yep, all cities have infrastructure and infrastructure problems. Politically speaking it is non-glorious spending with no golden shoves and photo-opps for the politicians, money spent underground is hard to see.

A growing thriving city can better afford to maintain it's aging infrastructure. The 1950's was a long times ago, the last time Detroit was a growing thriving city.

It's about the money stupid.

Also keep in mind that about 90% of our built environment didn't exist before WW2, it's just about all been built after WW2. At least this is what my text books 30 years ago read like. So yes it is all relatively new compared to old Europe but is spread about over a much greater area (little mass transit in US) which is how European cities manage to chug along via compact efficiency.

Love them or hate them, vertical circulation up and down in buildings is more efficient and compact than horizontally laid out roads. Cities are "green living", a very efficient way to load people on to the environment - that is as long as the politics preserves the countryside (as in Europe).

Some food for thought.

2017
Suburbanization in the United States after 1945
Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese
http://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-64
Not everyone was invited to the suburbs, for example in the mid 1980's there was still one little posted road sign going into Latrup Village where I rented a room to go to college. The sign read ; NO JEWS AND COLOREDS. This one square mile in Southfield MI (suburbia) wasn't racist from what I could tell, they just didn't want the problems they moved away from to follow them. And the Blacks tended to follow the Jews as whites didn't want to buy from Jews.

It is difficult to talk about the health of US cities without getting into past Federal policies and past racism, that's just a fact. Maybe not facts we want to be reminded of, but they are facts.

As with anything in life, and including stories - follow the money.

EDIT:
I encourage anyone having issues with all of the citations I bring to issues to go to the link I've provided.

Take note of the extensive citations they provide.


2017
Suburbanization in the United States after 1945
Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese
http://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-64
This is the standard of supporting documentation when writing a paper that is expected in architectural and urban design professions. And I dare say all professions based on science. I am quite dismayed when people do not support their thoughts with documentation, not because they don't (out of laziness) but because if they went though the process they would have known that their ideas are unsupported and flawed. It would save me the problem of correcting them and would free up time into fine tuning and exploring legitimate thoughts and ideas. Correcting emotionally fraught people is not my chosen profession, that is another field of study.

If a guy who screws roller skates on a Porsche lives anywhere near there it probably isn't a wise investment. Ask him how many lots he's bought.

I was just in downtown Detroit. There are a couple square miles by the stadiums that are liveable for suburban minded people. There is a Whole Foods down there, and places to shop. But you only need to drive a few blocks in the wrong direction, and you are in Mad Max land. My old neighborhood looks worse than ever.

The problem is that Detroit is 142 square miles. It's huge. Massive, aging infrastructure. There is fresh life in Detroit, but it's a tiny sprout in large tangled old forest.

Farm land. A couple of sacrificial crops to clean the upper soil. Maybe dairy farming? A lot of Christmas trees are farmed in MI.

Do grapes grow in Michigan?

Other similar cities have turned around their crumbling infrastructures and crappy basic services like police, fire, trash cleanup, etc. The real problem is the leadership in Detroit for the past 5-6 decades. They're not bright people and attracting new capital to the city just isn't in their DNA. Their collective mindset is 'what can you do for ME?'. Despite some of the highest city taxes anywhere, most of the money services something like $20 billion in debt, half of which goes for lavish public employee retiree pensions, healthcare, and other liabilities. And did we talk about the world-class corruption throughout local government and schools? Everybody's on the take. There were something like a dozen public school principles sent to prison a few years ago for bribes. Most didn't really think they were doing anything wrong.

The real problem with detroit? Demand. The population is less than 50% of the peak in the 50s. All those cool old houses, factories, etc were built to support a workforce and industry that has since packed up and left. No need for them.

City would be better raising the mess and returning it to farmland. but that costs money.

Every time I go to detroit i get my co worker to take me on a tour. It's really fascinating, and really sad. I don't think anything really like it anywhere at least in the US.

our old house built by the purple gang to run booze across the lake st clare
was razed along with the next door home to build a modern mansion at ten mile road
just out side detroit in st clare shores

so like all real estate it is location x3

The reason why not to snap up properties in Detroit is that they are not needed any more and there is no market for it. There are so many fewer people in Detroit today that 20 years ago, 40 years ago, and 60 years ago that there just is no longer a use for tens of thousands of houses, factories, and properties.

From Wikipedia:

Of the large shrinking cities of the United States, Detroit has had the most dramatic decline in population of the past 60 years (down 1,135,791) and the second largest percentage decline (down 61.4%, second only to St. Louis, Missouri's 62.7%). While the drop in Detroit's population has been ongoing since 1950, the most dramatic period was the significant 25% decline between the 2000 and 2010 Census.

In 1950 there were 1.8 million people who lived in Detroit. In 1990 a million people lived there. By 2010 only a little over 700,000 people lived in the city. The current estimate is that about 640,000 people live in a city that once housed 1.8 million. That's a lot of empty house and vacant land that are unused because they are no longer needed. Eventually many of those neighborhoods will be lowed under and returned to nature.

You are correct.

Don't forget the police department.

64 Detroit police officers criminally charged since 2016
Numbers dwarf Dallas, Atlanta, San Antonio
Posted: 3:17 PM, Jan 21, 2019
https://www.wxyz.com/news/64-detroit-police-officers-criminally-charged-since-2016
A friend of my wife lived in one of the upscale progressive neighborhood developments in Detroit....................until her car got stolen.

She remembers looking out her window to see a cop car early one morning checking out the cars parked on the street, and she thought - cool that makes me feel safer with them patrolling the area, I wonder if they are looking for evidence of misdoings.

Several cars stolen from the same street as the sun was coming up including hers.

She now suspects the cops were earmarking cars for the thieves, acting as their scouts.

And I suspect she is correct.

Tiger Stadium town homes. $400k.

https://www.wxyz.com/marketplace/home-tour/new-town-homes-for-sale-at-the-historic-site-of-old-tiger-stadium

Last time in Detroit for me I saw Mickey Lolich pitch. 1969, I think. Year after the World Series win.

If anyone comes up with a way to move the land from Michigan to Texas, I am in.

BURN
FD changed policy to let those abandoned crack houses burn.
There's probably a ton of good brick left over in them for building something else. Shame to waste it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searching_for_Sugar_Man not about Detroit but a good movie.
IIRC, Rodriguez was working demolition in the D when he was rediscovered.

One problem is that 95% of the homeowners in some distal neighborhood have already left, but one or two occupied houses remain and don't pay any taxes to the city. The utility and roads have to be maintained and somehow there is money enough for lawyers to force the state to keep subsidizing these holdouts. This gets very expensive for all the remaining taxpayers especially when the politicians then proceed to waste the entire budget on a golden floating football stadium built by their cousin for an abandoned high school, or big holiday bonuses and perks for legislatures and bureaucrats.

That corruption is why the state had to step in and take over with the last bankruptcy. And Kwame finally went to jail but not for killing prostitutes on cocaine.

No one will go to Detroit, it's a crap hole. Someone mentioned grapes or farmland, probably the best option.

The Dems will never let it recover, it's such a great example of their success at destroying cities!

Heartbreaking... :(

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