Has Detroit been "destroyed?"

Quote:

The question, AZDoof, was not whether it was livable, but whether it was "destroyed". If you think Detroit has been destroyed, you live in a different reality from the rest of us.

Since you seem to want to continue making troll-like statements I will let the WoV board rule on this one. OK, folks, who is in the different reality?


NOTE: Sorry for the wording of the first one, there were only so many charachters to work with.

Quote: AZDuffman

Since you seem to want to continue making troll-like statements I will let the WoV board rule on this one. OK, folks, who is in the different reality?


NOTE: Sorry for the wording of the first one, there were only so many charachters to work with.

Anyone who votes "yes" is failing the stupidity test, and needs to learn how to use a dictionary. AZDoof has made up a new meaning for the word "destroyed", but it isn't a valid meaning no matter how many people vote for it. I seriously doubt that anyone, including AZDoof, actually thinks that Detroit has been destroyed---it is such a profoundly stupid thing to think or say. But this board is full of wingnuts who will spout any nonsense to prove a point.

How stupid you all are! (FIVE PEOPLE think there aren't any buildings or people left in Detroit!!!!)

I think it depends on how you qualify destroyed. The Free Dictionary.com gives a number of different meanings, one of which is To ruin completely; spoil. I cant say I have an opinion on this, but I think I can see where both sides are coming from on the arguament.

Quote: mkl654321

Anyone who votes "yes" is failing the stupidity test, and needs to learn how to use a dictionary. AZDoof has made up a new meaning for the word "destroyed", but it isn't a valid meaning no matter how many people vote for it. I seriously doubt that anyone, including AZDoof, actually thinks that Detroit has been destroyed---it is such a profoundly stupid thing to think or say. But this board is full of wingnuts who will spout any nonsense to prove a point.

How stupid you all are!

Speaking of stupid, maybe *YOU* should learn how to use a dictionary:

idiom id·i·om [ íddee əm ] (plural id·i·oms)

Definition:

1. fixed expression with nonliteral meaning


First you said Detroit was not "a society but part of a larger society." Well, everyone saw that was silly since no matter how you divde it, anything less than the entire world fits that logic. Next you said Detroit was not a product of liberal policies, then it was shown that it had nothing but liberal politicians and policies for 50+ years. Now you want to get hung up on the meaning of "destroyed" when anyone who learned english as a first language understands what is being implied.

Then you go to the tired retort of liberals and call us all "wingnuts."

Can you learn to act like an adult and drop the troll behavior, or do you want to keep making a jerk out of yourself?

Quote: Croupier

I think it depends on how you qualify destroyed. The Free Dictionary.com gives a number of different meanings, one of which is To ruin completely; spoil. I cant say I have an opinion on this, but I think I can see where both sides are coming from on the arguament.

I was aware of this definition. Detroit has not been COMPLETELY ruined; parts of it have been, but the vast majority of the city is still perfectly functional. And whether or not something has been "spoiled" is a subjective evaluation. Would I want to live there? Hell, no. Do people live there? Yes.

Obviously the wingnut contingent is trying to make a point through exaggeration, but that doesn't mean the exaggeration is true. I'm a student of history. I know what a city that has ACTUALLY been "destroyed" looks like. Detroit is blighted, its inner core is being abandoned, and it suffers from very high crime and unemployment. However, it continues to exist and function, and its infrastructure and institutions remain intact. That hardly equates to being "destroyed".

Not that the wingnuts will ever admit they were wrong. In an argument over the meaning of an English word, I have the dictionary on my side; they have only noise on theirs. Game, set, match. (Not that I take any particular pride in refuting a gang of mentally unstable wingnuts.)

Quote: http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty506.htm

HOW IMMIGRATION AND MULTICULURALISM DESTROYED DETROIT
By Frosty Wooldridge
October 5, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

For 15 years, from the mid 1970s to 1990, I worked in Detroit, Michigan. I watched it descend into the abyss of crime, debauchery, gun play, drugs, school truancy, car-jacking, gangs and human depravity. I watched entire city blocks burned out. I watched graffiti explode on buildings, cars, trucks, buses and school yards. Trash everywhere! Detroiters walked through it, tossed more into it and ignored it.
...
Multiculturalism: what a perfect method to kill our language, culture, country and way of life.

Interesting that Detroit was the fourth largest city in 1920, 1930, and 1940 and the fifth largest in 1950,1960, and 1970 when Los Angeles broke into the top four. But you can easily argue that immigration and multiculturalism built Detroit into a city as it was ranked #13 in the year 1900.

Quote: pacomartin

Quote: http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty506.htm

HOW IMMIGRATION AND MULTICULURALISM DESTROYED DETROIT

Interesting that Detroit was the fourth largest city in 1920, 1930, and 1940 and the fifth largest in 1950,1960, and 1970 when Los Angeles broke into the top four. But you can easily argue that immigration and multiculturalism built Detroit into a city as it was ranked #13 in the year 1900.

Detroit still exists. People still live there. Its buildings, roads, and bridges are still standing.

In a history book, I once read an editorial column from a New York newspaper that said that New York was being "destroyed" (yes, same wording) by the "hordes" of immigrant Irish and Italians. In the same book, there was also an excerpt from a San Francisco newspaper that complained about all the Chinese defiling the city. Those columns were both written in the 1850s. In other words, this kind of xenophobic raving is nothing new.

There is a basic human tendency to divide ourselves into "ingroups" and "outgroups". One of the most common ways to do that is to divide ourselves along racial, ethnic, or national lines. That way, any problem that the ingroup experiences can be blamed on the outgroup--it's not OUR fault, it's all those dirty (insert name of group) we let into our community. It's knee-jerk, archaic, and outdated thinking--especially in a nation where we are ALL the children of immigrants (even the Indians).

And anyone who didn't sleep through high school history class knows that EVERY SINGLE ONE of our cities was built on immigration and multiculturalism. Those filthy no good wops/kikes/spicks/chinks/gooks/etc. brought dynamism and diversity to the culture of our cities. I was personal witness to the latest wave, that from Southeast Asia. They moved into the shittiest part of town (because that's all they could afford), and after five years, transformed it into a vibrant, prosperous, and safe neighborhood. And they did it THEMSELVES, without outside assistance. I find it amusing that conservative wingnuts hate them durn immigrants, but at the same time, bleat about the value of those very virtues that those immigrants show--self-reliance and hard work.

Quote: mkl654321

Detroit still exists. People still live there. Its buildings, roads, and bridges are still standing.

As this experienced observer points out, that may be only because they lack demolition funds. He also omits the failing effort to restore Woodward Road or the travesty of Kwame Kilpatrick and his sister Ayanna, along with the clear unwillingness of the citizenry to do anything about the deplorable situation.

David Frum: What killed Detroit?

Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the 1920s — the booming home of a glamorous new industry, a place where huge fortunes were conjured in years, sometimes months. But while the creators of the computer industry have as yet bequeathed very little to the built environment, the automobile industry piled up around it an astounding American city, in astoundingly little time.

The Detroit of 1910 was a thriving Midwestern milling and shipping entrepot, a bigger Minneapolis. The Detroit of 1930 had rebuilt itself as a grand metropolis of skyscrapers, mansions, movie palaces and frame cottages spreading northward beyond the line of sight, exceeding Philadelphia and St. Louis, rivaling Chicago and New York. I had a chance to tour central Detroit recently, my first visit to the downtown core in many, many years.

Some of the old visual magnificence remains, has even been improved. The Guardian tower displays again the blazing colors of its vaulted atrium, long covered up by dry wall. The marble adorning the Fisher building still glows. The Renaissance Center, once as walled and moated against the city as a medieval castle, has lowered its defenses, especially on the side facing the Detroit River. But for the most part, all is decay. Whole towers stand empty, waiting to join the long line of grand structures that have either been abandoned to pillage and ruin, like Detroit’s once magnificent neoclassical skyscraper of a train station, or else pulled down entirely, like the downtown Dayton Hudson department store, once the largest enclosed shopping space in the United States.

Detroit’s fall was as steep and rapid as its rise. In 1960 it remained a thriving city, showing early signs of future trouble yes, but still strong, rich, and proud. By 1970, Detroit was a byword for urban dystopia. A small symbol of the change. In 1962, the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company commissioned a new headquarters building. Rather than build tall, they built opulently, hiring the then avant-garde Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki, and installing elaborate new technologies: elegant new lighting systems and an elevator management program that ensured that there was always an open car waiting on the ground floor. The building acted as a prototype for Moriyama’s most famous achievement, the World Trade Center. The restaurant at the top, Detroit’s answer to Windows on the World, closed in 1974. It has never been replaced. The gas company moved out. Today, almost every floor of the building stands vacant.

Detroit Then and Now by Cheri Gay compiles a series of photographs to illustrate the change. The book in one way is a disappointment: it’s written in a tone of forced boosterism that requires the author to deny the reality of the collapse she’s chronicling. Detroit was vibrant then, and it remains vibrant now, she wishes to argue… like Sarah Palin’s career, it’s just advancing in a different direction.

This mode of argument will convince nobody. But sustaining it does require the author to avert her glance from those sections of the city where the theme of evolution cannot possibly be sustained: the acres of abandoned houses, the vacant lots where commercial enterprises once stood.

But here is one thing that I do learn from the book: Detroit has never been protective of its past. In the prosperous early 1960s, it used federal urban renewal funds to pull down its grand Romanesque 19th century city hall. (Detroit wants to use today’s TARP money to repeat its vandalism, this time on the old train station.)

Detroit sacrificed a handsome row of pre-Civil War mansions built by then-leading citizens to allow the Detroit News to erect a bland new office and printing block. It has erased almost all traces of its pre-automobile past from the downtown, and only lack of demolition funds preserved its oldest surviving downtown neighborhood, now faintly recovering as a yuppie-gay historical enclave.

Not all the urban renewal schemes failed. I was dazzled by a Mies van der Rohe townhome project, a human-scale garden streetscape in the middle of the city, so lovely that you could almost forgive the grim adjoining Mies van der Rohe high-rise apartment projects.

More often, however, urban renewal was to Detroit what the RAF was to Dresden. One heart-rending contrast: the General Motors plant in Hamtramck, where acres of solid working-class housing were bulldozed — not to make way for the factory itself, which required relatively little space — but so that the factory could be surrounded by parking lots, grass and a wide moat of highway from the rest of the city. It makes a heart-rending contrast to the abandoned 1920s Packard factory I visited, where cottages had been built literally across the lane from the factory wall: literally 40 feet away.

What killed Detroit?

The collapse of the automobile industry seems the obvious answer. But is it a sufficient answer? The departure of meatpacking did not kill Chicago. Pittsburgh has staggered forward from the demise of steelmaking. New York has lost one industry after another: shipping, garment-manufacture, printing, and how many more?

Two other factors have to be considered.

The first is the especially and maybe uniquely poisonous quality of Detroit’s race relations. Like Chicago, Detroit attracted hundreds of thousands of black migrants between 1915 and 1960, mostly very unskilled, hoping to gain well-paying employment in factories and warehouses.

Their arrival jeopardized the ambitions of the white working class to raise its wages through unionization. Henry Ford eagerly hired black workers in order to defeat the unions, and in the violent labor clashes of the 1930s, whites and blacks often confronted each other as strikers and strikebreakers.

After the war, the United Autoworkers union tried to integrate blacks into the industrial workforce. But by then automation had begun, and industry’s demand for unskilled labor would first cease to grow, then diminish, then disappear. For many migrants, the promised land soon proved a mirage. Or maybe worse than a mirage. If the promised land did not yield the hoped-for industrial jobs, it offered something else: generous new welfare programs, the ashy false fruit of urban liberalism. The children of the parents who accepted the fruit grew into the criminals who drove first the middle class and then the working class out of the downtown and then altogether out of the city.

As the white working class departed, Detroit became a black-majority city, governed by a deeply aggrieved and flagrantly corrupt political class. Political dysfunction spiraled the city into another cycle of dissolution and abandonment — and the abandonment in turn provided the politicians with fresh grievances.

The second factor in Detroit’s decline is the city’s defiant rejection of education and the arts. Pittsburgh has Carnegie-Mellon. Cleveland has Case Western Reserve University. Chicago has the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and a campus of the University of Illinois. Detroit has… Wayne State.

A city that celebrated industrial culture spurned high culture. The Detroit Institute of Arts is very nice. But it does not begin to compare to Cleveland’s museum, let alone the Art Institute of Chicago. Detroit has a symphony orchestra, but its history has been troubled and unstoried in comparison to Philadelphia’s or Cleveland’s. On the plaza in front of the Detroit municipal building is a huge bronze replica of Joe Louis’ fist and arm, as if to say: “Here is a city ruled by brawn.” Brawn counts for very little in the modern world. The earnest redevelopers who hoped to renew Detroit by razing its history instead destroyed the raw materials out of which urban renaissance has come to so so many other American downtowns. A couple of days after I returned from Detroit, I telephoned a friend who had lived and worked in the city for many years. My friend, it’s relevant to mention, is the son of an Irish cop, ardently Catholic and defiantly conservative. Why did Chicago recover and Detroit fail, I asked. What doomed the city? He thought for a moment. “Not enough gays.”

Detroit confirms the lessons taught by Jane Jacobs and Russell Kirk. Preservation is as vital to urban health as renovation. Indeed, they are inseparable. The preservation of the old incubates the new.

It’s a lesson with application not only to Detroit’s past, but its future. The great factory complexes along the Detroit River have shuttered. America no longer manufactures here. Some will want to rip the factories down. Leave them be — leave them for now as monuments and memorials of the achievements of the past; leave them for the future, when somebody will want them. Want them for what? Who can say? Who in 1950 could ever have imagined London’s Docklands converted into condominiums? Who would have guessed that New York’s emptied toolshops would provide some of the city’s most coveted office space? The 22nd century will put the artifacts of the 20th to equally unsurmisable uses, if only we permit it. Cities can molder for a century or more, and then reawaken to a new era that rediscovers something of value in the detritus of an earlier time. Brooklyn did. So did Miami Beach. Ditto Boston and Charleston — and even more spectacularly, Dublin and Prague. The promise of renaissance may yet come true, even for the ghost city of Detroit.

Quote: SanchoPanza

Some of the old visual magnificence remains, has even been improved.

Yes. Large parts of the city are decaying shitholes. The city government is profoundly dysfunctional, and people are leaving like rats from a sinking ship.

However, the city, as you note, continues to exist and endure. The situation is far from hopeless. What I find ironic is that Detroit would be considered Nirvana to inhabitants of Kinshasa, Lagos, Havana, Grozny, or Port-au-Prince, to name just a few places. We view it as a distaster area only because our comparison rubric is so stringent. We are used to shiny skyscrapers filled with bustling, productive people, who, after a hard day's work, eat at fine restaurants, go to the opera or symphony, or attend a major league baseball or football game.

To say that the place is "destroyed because of liberalism" is both to invent a new definition of "destroyed" and to exaggerate the effects of liberalism. Many other cities were subject to the same political climate and demographic shifts in the last several decades. Not all of them suffered Detroit's fate. If you want to tease out a single cause of that, it would plausibly be the failures of the auto industry--the one thing that makes Detroit unique among American cities.

I once owned a Ford Pinto. The experience of owning, and often pushing rather than driving, that car was a very strong indicator for me of what would eventually happen to Detroit.

Quote: mkl654321

To say that the place is "destroyed because of liberalism" is both to invent a new definition of "destroyed" and to exaggerate the effects of liberalism. Many other cities were subject to the same political climate and demographic shifts in the last several decades. Not all of them suffered Detroit's fate. If you want to tease out a single cause of that, it would plausibly be the failures of the auto industry--the one thing that makes Detroit unique among American cities.

The auto industry was driven out by liberal policies. Look at how well plenty of places in the south attracted auto plants, who were more happy to build in a place more friendly to business. Gary, IN was also destroyed by liberalism. Plenty more as well. But like the typical extremest liberal you refuse to see what is reality and rather argue the definition of "destroyed."

"Hey you, ducking bullets in Detroit, be happy you don't live in Legos."
"Hey kids, half of whom fail out of schools, it is worse in Havana."
"Hey poor unemployed person, unemployment is far worse than 15% in Por-au-Prince."

"All you people, it isn't as bad as it could be. But be sure to keep electing liberals. Because even if you are living in a falling down house in a crime-indfested neighborhood with government that does not work at all, the city isn't destroyed."

Quote: AZDuffman

"All you people, it isn't as bad as it could be. But be sure to keep electing liberals. Because even if you are living in a falling down house in a crime-indfested neighborhood with government that does not work at all, the city isn't destroyed."

I'm probably the only person here who lives in MI. I live in the western part of the state and nobody here talks about Detroit. Its like it was hit by an atom bomb 25 years ago and we don't discuss it. Its like visiting a foreign country, you have to go there to believe the devestation a declining population has on a big city. Whole neighborhoods with boarded up business fronts and empty houses. Whole neighborhoods that never see a police car. Whole generations that drop out of school and deal drugs and go to prison. Detroit is a 3rd world country. Visit there, I dare you.

Quote: EvenBob

Whole neighborhoods with boarded up business fronts and empty houses. Whole neighborhoods that never see a police car. Whole generations that drop out of school and deal drugs and go to prison.

There are a lot of places like that here too. It happens a lot on the outskirts of the major cities. I dont know how bad it is in Detroit, but the same thing is happening in the UK, maybe not to the same extent, but its happening.

Quote: Croupier

There are a lot of places like that here too. It happens a lot on the outskirts of the major cities. I dont know how bad it is in Detroit, but the same thing is happening in the UK, maybe not to the same extent, but its happening.

In Detroit its on a huge scale, thats the difference. A city that once housed 2mil and now houses 850K has a lot of empty real estate just sitting there. Think about this: The AVERAGE price of a house in Detroit is $7500. Thats what houses were selling for 50 years ago.

Its happening here now because before the recession, councils were knocking down these vacant areas and rebuilding them. Thats not happening now to try and bring the governments lending out of a huge deficit and cuts have been made. I suppose thats an advantage in England. Were low on housing space, so these places will get recycled. In somewhere like the US where there is still relatively plenty of space in most cities moving becomes a more attractive option. Give me a green card and Id live there. Miight be the only way I would ever get the chance to emigrate to the US.

Quote: Croupier

Give me a green card and Id live there. Miight be the only way I would ever get the chance to emigrate to the US.

Ever been here? The sheer size of the US is quite intimidating to a lot of folks from the UK. My wife is going to visit our daughter next week and its a 10 hour drive. Thats really not very far, her parents are 19 hours away by car.

I am in Detroit fairly often. I think there are a couple more people on the board from there. EvenBob is right; the citizenry has totally abandoned it and put it out of their minds. You don't even drive through it; you go through the suburbs. All the civic, economic, and recreational activity takes place in the sprawling suburbs. It is really a bizarre place and I recommend visiting it. There is some nice architecture downtown and it's fun to walk around and ride the people mover. Outside of downtown, there is some really weird abandoned areas which are neat if you are not worried about crime. I walked through downtown Detroit with a good bit of money on me and was not worried because there are simply no people around!

Quote: AZDuffman

The auto industry was driven out by liberal policies. Look at how well plenty of places in the south attracted auto plants, who were more happy to build in a place more friendly to business. Gary, IN was also destroyed by liberalism. Plenty more as well. But like the typical extremest liberal you refuse to see what is reality and rather argue the definition of "destroyed."

"Hey you, ducking bullets in Detroit, be happy you don't live in Legos."
"Hey kids, half of whom fail out of schools, it is worse in Havana."
"Hey poor unemployed person, unemployment is far worse than 15% in Por-au-Prince."

"All you people, it isn't as bad as it could be. But be sure to keep electing liberals. Because even if you are living in a falling down house in a crime-indfested neighborhood with government that does not work at all, the city isn't destroyed."

Legos are building blocks,
Havana's literacy rate is over 99% and has world-class education,
If by Por-au-Prince you meant Port-au-Prince then you got the third one right.

Detroit is rough. If a large University were built there it may attract some talent or develop some talent. It will be years before it recovers but eventually there will be money to be made.
-BW

Quote: teddys

I am in Detroit fairly often. I think there are a couple more people on the board from there. EvenBob is right; the citizenry has totally abandoned it and put it out of their minds. You don't even drive through it; you go through the suburbs. All the civic, economic, and recreational activity takes place in the sprawling suburbs. It is really a bizarre place and I recommend visiting it. There is some nice architecture downtown and it's fun to walk around and ride the people mover. Outside of downtown, there is some really weird abandoned areas which are neat if you are not worried about crime. I walked through downtown Detroit with a good bit of money on me and was not worried because there are simply no people around!

But, it isn't "destroyed". Abandoned isn't the same thing as destroyed, nor do I believe that it has been completely abandoned. (How could you ride the "people mover" if there was no one to operate it, and why would they operate it if there's no one to ride it?)

Saying that Detroit is "destroyed" is hyperbole, not fact.

I'm not taking a side on the argument that it is destroyed or not. For people who don't frequent the area, they may think it is destroyed. For the 4 million people in the metro area, you may get a different estimation. They don't want to hear you call their core city "destroyed" or abandoned, when you have to live and work there and deal with people putting down your city every day. So they are a little biased.

So, no, I don't think it is destroyed, but it is in EXTREMELY rough shape.

I went to a Tigers game with a friend and we sat in the upper deck, and watched the lights come on in the buildings downtown as it got dark. We counted at least half of the buildings were abandoned with no lights. You can also drive down I-75 and count the buildings with busted windows and crumbling walls. It's just very, very eerie.

That said, once you go beyond the downtown "donut" there are some viable neighborhoods, but nothing thriving. You have to get to the burbs to find anything even remotely useful or livable.

Then there is the whole race problem. I found this map very interesting, it shows you the stark racial divides in the city.

Quote:

(How could you ride the "people mover" if there was no one to operate it, and why would they operate it if there's no one to ride it?)

Heh, the people mover is actually operated by computer. It's pretty cool.