Requim for Detroit

Björn Helgaso · 2010-03-13T10:14:27+00:00

One in five houses now stand empty. Property prices have fallen 80% ormore in Detroit over the last three years. A three-bedroom house onAlbany Street is still on the market for $1.Unemployment has reached 30%; 33.8% of Detroit's population and 48.5%of its children live below the poverty line. Forty-seven per cent ofadults in Detroit are functionally illiterate; 29 Detroit schoolsclosed in 2009 alone.But statistics tell only one part of the story. The reality of Detroitis far more visceral."Never get out of the car in that area =96 people have been car-jackedand shot."Law and order has completely broken down in the inner city, drugs andprostitution are rampant and unless you actually murder someone thepolice will leave you alone.What makes all this so hard to understand is that Detroit was thefrontier city of the American Dream =96 not just the automobile, butpretty much everything we associate with 20th-century westerncivilisation came from there. Mass production; assembly lines; stoplights; freeways; shopping malls; suburbs and an emerging middle-classworkforce: all these things were pioneered in Detroit.But the seeds of the Motor City's downfall were sown a long time ago.The blind belief of the Big Three in the automobile as aninexhaustible golden goose, guaranteeing endless streams of cash,resulted in the city becoming reliant on a single industry. Itsdestiny fatally entwined with that of the car. The greed-fuelledwillingness of the auto barons to siphon up black workers from theAmerican south to man their Metropolis-like assembly lines and thentreat them as subhuman citizens, running the city along virtuallyapartheid lines, created a racial tinderbox.

Requim for Detroit

Mar 13, 2010 42 Replies

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gosinn 12 years ago

there are several places experimenting lending vehicles for short time

often in connection with trains

several driverless railbased vehicles

works like horisontal elevators

compared with other means the numbers are small

bicycles, golfvehicles, inside buildings, some city centers are fully electric as well as most long distance trains

it takes time for the infrastructures to change but it has definitely started and the techniques are available

cities where you can walk, bike and use public transport are more likely to be better and more popular

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Canuck57 12 years ago

Detroit isn't the only one, I expect it to quickly spread like a cancer. Lots of governments are bankrupt. Even Washington DC.

Going to get messy. As people realize the city has been running government and union bloat fraud.

No sympathies.

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Ed Pawlowski 12 years ago

They should cut government services, except, of course, the ones "I" use.

I have to live on my paycheck, government entities should do the same and live on their income. You just can't keep raising the tax rate.

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