Detroit's population crashes down 25% from 2000
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Detroit, and other cities in the rust belt, generally have plentiful fresh water, not to mention natural infrastructure waiting to be re-used (harbors, rivers, etc). If I was making a 100 year bet, I wouldn't bet on Vegas, I'd bet on Detroit.
If you want to make a real 100 year bet on Detroit, buy some real estate now, it has never been cheaper. In some places you could buy an entire city block for a few grand. You could will it to your grandchildren. I've considered it, but haven't convinced my wife... yet.
But the biggest reason I haven't done it is the city government. The above reasons not to invest in Detroit are clear - taxes, unknown assessments, liability. Allowing some of the land to go fallow or zoned agricultural or a long property tax holiday would help tremendously. The most expensive thing about living in Detroit are the taxes and the regulation if you can live through the crime.
If Detroit dies, but the people living formerly living inside it are better off, isn't that a good thing?
Detroit does have a great opportunity in all this though - there are a lot of talented people still living in and around the city. It would seem like the ideal location for some truly innovative automotive advancements and with the push for more green and eco-friendly cars, I'm surprised there aren't a few startup communities designed to engage this currently dormant group of potential hackers.
Anyone interested should email me.
If/when I move back to the D Ill be joining OCD asap
The talent is there and there's a large number of people who have left and would return in a heartbeat if the jobs were there.
Michigan's new governor is a former VC and the state is staking their future on startups and entrepreneurs. He's trying to lower taxes, smaller companies will pay zero taxes under his plan.
However Michigan's unions are fighting him tooth and nail even though he is not challenging their power directly like the governors in Wisconsin and Ohio. So despite the voters giving him a majority in both legislatures he may not achieve everything he wants. What there won't be are the huge government handouts to favored companies that the previous governor was fond of using.
They are, however, fighting him on the ability to deploy to cities in financial disarray state appointed "emergency managers" who can override elected officials and, most importantly to the unions, cut union contracts. [1]
Now, you could argue that the emergency financial manager plan would eventually result in lower taxes and an easier path to success for smaller companies. You could also argue that there are better ways to achieve that same result rather than said plan.
[1] - http://www.wxyz.com/dpp/news/region/wayne_county/governor-ri...
What the proposed law does is give some bargaining strength to the state's beleagured cities and school boards. Unions are more likely to reach agreement when there's the threat of the governor appointing an emergency manager. I think the reality is that the governor won't use that power often. A large number of the city's in the state face bankruptcy and that's a lot more unpleasant outcome.
We are faced with some very unpleasant choices in the state. We're in trouble because previous governors from both parties kicked the can down the road with paper fixes. The governor is calling for shared sacrifice and those having to recieve less don't like it one bit.
I live in Ferndale, but I have an idea that is very suitable for Detroi - but I won't pursue it until there are some more changes happening in the city council.
[0] http://www.stlmag.com/Blogs/SLM-Daily/February-2011/The-Top-...
For almost all of human history we've only had to deal with issues of growth. There are of course exceptions to this. Some cities that were massive are either small now or have ceased to exist. Some (like London) went through centuries of virtual depopulation before being reborn (between the Roman departure and the 10th-11th century).
But modern city depopulation seems to create some fairly big problems. Cities with significant depopulation (eg Detroit, Baltimore) are known for crime. Some say this causes the depopulation, which may well be true, but it also exacerbates it, as drug addicts and the like move into decaying and abandoned areas.
Going forward, this is going to be a significant problem we'll have to deal with, I believe. The reason I believe that is that it is my opinion that there are simply too many people on this planet. Ultimately it's unsustainable. Either we'll solve this by breeding less or nature will do it for us.
Either way, if this comes to pass, we'll need to figure out how to shrink urban centers effectively. That's going to be painful.
As for Detroit, it's certainly well off its peak in the 50s and 60s. It may be cheap (and thus, arguably, attractive to investors) but it's cheap for a reason. I'm sure Chechnya is cheap too.
If by breeding less you mean breeding less than the replacement level so that we can get to a "sustainable" size, I think you are wrong. Our sun puts out enough fusion power that, if we could capture a small chunk of it, each of us could personally use the current energy budge of the entire earth. Ultimately population growth at some fixed percentage is unsustainable (population growth at a fixed percentage grows exponentially, our light-cone polynomially), but I don't think earth's current population is.