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Comment by jacksonpollack | Hacker News Reader

Since you tend to go there only when dealing with foreclosed homes, perhaps you aren't seeing some of the nicer places? I have plenty of friends who live in Detroit and love it. I used to live there myself and loved it. Yes, there is ruin porn a-plenty, and many nasty areas. But there are also neighborhoods where you can live for really cheap and be part of a great, caring community.

Of course, I'm sure my thoughts on the matter in no way reflect the majority's opinion. I've lived in Toronto for 4 years now, and not a day goes by without me pining to go back to Detroit.

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Dibble's First Law of Sociology: Some do; some don't.

Accentuating the positive is cold comfort. Tenth-century Rome hosted the development of Gregorian chant and papal charters for the first universities. Focusing on those positive developments doesn't change the fact that Rome was a step or two above a cow town compared to contemporary Constantinople or, better yet, first-century Rome.

Of course Detroit has nice places and nice people. I saw examples of that and my brothers have seen more. The reason why so many people focus on the ruin porn is that Detroit has so much more of it than most cities of its size. Speaking of size, Detroit has lost more than half of its population in forty years. Satellite photos reveal that the city is steadily returning to wilderness. This happened to the premier heavy industrial city of what was supposed to be the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth. This is a flipping travesty!

Similar decline happened to other American cities at the same time. Philadelphia. Saint Louis. Newark. The South Side of Chicago. Parts of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It nearly happened to the entirety of New York. Let's face it, these cities were more livable when they were run by ethnic machine politics staffed by people who squeaked through third-tier parochial colleges.

What makes this ruin porn all the more infuriating -- and disturbing -- is that it started when the cool people with the right ideas from the Ivy League schools stepped in. This is what makes us really uncomfortable. We know that it's "incorrect" to say it. The urban renewal and racial integration policies that were ostensibly supposed to improve these cities have utterly and ignominiously failed.

"What makes this ruin porn all the more infuriating -- and disturbing -- is that it started when the cool people with the right ideas from the Ivy League schools stepped in."

Post hoc, ergo proper hoc? I don't necessarily disagree with you, but don't you think that there might be more contributing factors? In particular, the decline of the American auto industry comes to mind in regards to Detroit.

The American automobile industry didn't really get hit by imports until the Oil Shocks of the 1970s. By then, the productive population of Detroit was already fleeing to the suburbs. Also, if the decline of the American automobile industry explains the decline of Detroit, then the suburbs of Detroit would have declined as well, instead of expanding. Furthermore, the decline of the American automobile industry does not explain why similar declines occurred in the other cities which I mentioned.

The suburbs of Detroit are also in decline. For how many years now has Michigan been in the bottom quartile for unemployment?

The fact that Twelve Oaks Mall is nice and has an Apple Store doesn't mean that that the Detroit Suburbs are proof of a functioning greater Detroit metro economy.

"Decline" means different things when applied to Detroit and to its suburbs. The suburbs are much safer and have much better infrastructure, among many other things.

Higher up in this thread, I referenced the book The Slaughter of Cities, by E. Michael Jones. That is the book around which my views have gelled.

FYI, being better off than one's neighbor doesn't make one not poor.

Obviously the decline of the auto industry was a major factor in Detroit's fall but the civil unrest of the late 60s is what caused the "white flight" out of Detroit and into the suburbs. The city has remained unstable since for a slew of reasons, the biggest one likely being corrupt government.

There's just very little incentive to live in the city itself anymore between the lack of small businesses, crime, etc. I heard a story of a guy who purchased an entire block of houses, demolished them, built new condos and was waiting on city inspection so people could start moving in. Inspection took a while and in the meantime the newly-built condos were broken into and stripped of any valuable piping/wiring. Does that really a place you want to live in? The only reasons I go into the city are for sporting events, the occasional concert, or urbex.

The segregation of Detroit and its metropolitan area are SHOCKING. Look at this map: http://bit.ly/ptgVNe

The blue is African-Americans. The red is Caucasians. The all-too-clear division begins at 8 mile.

Some sort of link has to be established in order to unify the suburbs and the city. Hopefully the M1 rail project can be that link -- unfortunately, like I said in another comment, the rail has to stretch further into the suburbs for it to have any chance of success, IMO.

New York and Newark are nothing like Detroit right now. Both are going through a great revival. There are a lot of reasons why, but it really has nothing to do with machine politics, ivy league educated people, or anything else you mentioned.

In my opinion, most of the credit goes to better policing, everything else follows the drop in crime.

I very nearly agree with you, but I'd argue that policing has little to do with it as well.

Detroit's crime rate has plummeted since the 1970s along with the rest of the US, despite no widely-celebrated crackdown. [1] Indeed crime rates have continued their drop from even the early 2000s despite a police department that was rapidly shrinking and increasingly mired in corruption/abuse investigations over that same time frame.

What's holding Detroit back, imo, are uncompetitive services caused by too few funds to cover too much sprawl. Even as the downtown enjoys a modest revival, the neighborhoods are non-options for anyone who wants to own a home. Particularly when functional suburbs with lower taxes and great schools are less than thirty minutes down the highway.

The city needs consolidation.

[1] The only anti-crime campaign I can even recall, was the mid-90s community effort to combat Devil's Night.

Perhaps they should take a look at how east German cities were and are coping with a shrinking population?

Very interesting perspective, I'll admit I know little about Detroit although I have been there twice in the last 2 years for a few days on business so I have seen the city in its current state.

Urban renewal and racial integration are to blame, and not the destruction of the entire regional economy? Or, not to put to fine a point on it, did black people kill the auto industry too?

I grew up on the south side of Chicago, by the way, and I don't know what you're talking about, unless your suggestion is that any metropolis that has bad neighborhoods is evidence of the failure of racial integration.

The key word is ethnicity. The book that changed my way of thinking about the subject is _The Slaughter of Cities_, by E. Michael Jones.

http://www.amazon.com/Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Ethnic-Cleans...

"In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to do with design or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the last gasp attempt of the WASP ruling class to take control of a country that was slipping out of its grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be driven out of their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to be "Americanized" according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and "integration," the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood got transformed into something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the actual communities of people they saw as a threat to their control."

"The largely Catholic ethnics" (I'm a Catholic of Irish and Eastern European descent) were not "driven out" of their neighborhoods. They left them as a reaction to integration and the beginning of the end of redlining policies. The "control" they lost was "the ability not to live next to ethnic minorities other than their own".

Moreover, upon leaving the white Irish Catholic and Polish enclaves, mortgage lending moved with them, leaving the neighborhoods to be filled with residents who were systematically denied ownership of their own homes. The attending decline in property values and upkeep were entirely predictable.

Again: we have a situation clearly explainable through economics, and you seem intent on injecting race into it. Why?

Drive a few hours south from the (gradually but painfully resurging) south side of Chicago to southern Illinois and you'll find predominantly white towns that have been similarly devastated by the rural economy and the decline of small-scale midwestern manufacturing jobs, and methamphetamine.

Also: you're not a little concerned that the "book that changed your way of thinking" about urban decay was written by a guy that has a whole section on the ADL's website, who has written of a "Jewish takeover of American culture"?

Yes, they were driven out. There was a sharp increase in crime caused by the friction of disparate groups suddenly coming in close contact with each other (Devil's Night and so forth). Yugoslavia broke up due to such friction, and those ethnic groups have been in contact with each other for centuries. The Malays and Chinese of Malaysia have had plenty of scuffles, too, and they've been around each other for a long time, as well. Those are just two examples. Diversity + Proximity = War. A fortiori, integration in Detroit was going to be eventful.

Furthermore, a lot of people throughout the world like to live next to those who are like themselves. I mean, a lot. When I was younger, I was shocked by the attitudes of older members of my family towards out-groups. I'm a little older, now, and see that it's not going away. We need to build around this fact of human nature, because we can't plow it through.

If the remaining residents of Detroit were being "systematically denied ownership of their own homes" then some bank could make a killing giving them home loans. During the housing bubble, we saw what happened when banks did that. My brothers make a living picking up the pieces.

I'm not injecting race into anything because race was a part of this to begin with. Noam Chomsky, in his book Understanding Power, noted this: "Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic."

The blank slate hypothesis of human nature has a lot of evidence going against it. If natural selection is true, then different populations of any species must have different distributions of alleles. Otherwise, there's nothing for natural selection to select. Cochran & Harpending cover this: http://the10000yearexplosion.com/

As for E. Michael Jones, he didn't start going into his theory of the Jews until after he wrote his other work.

I'm sufficiently creeped out now to let you have the last word. Jiminy.

> As for E. Michael Jones, he didn't start going into his theory of the Jews until after he wrote his other work.

Yeah, and I'm more than a little creeped-out calling anything this guy produces a "theory" or even "work".

Since you keep bringing up this guy's theories as such a transformative event for you and all, just for edification, here's what the Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about his "theory of the Jews":

"The magazine's cover stories over the last year or so are instructive: "Judaizing: Then and Now," "John Huss and the Jews," "The Converso Problem: Then and Now," "The Judaism of Hitler," "Shylock Comes to Notre Dame" and so on. Jones runs through all the usual anti-Semitic canards -- the ideas that "Jewish media elites" run the country, that Jews are "major players" in pornography, and that Jews are behind Masonry and the French Revolution -- but that's only the start. He also accuses Jews of poisoning society with thinkers such as Karl Marx (a devotee of Satan, says Jones) and Sigmund Freud (who set off an epidemic of sexual sin, he says). And he describes the World War II Nazi genocide of the Jews as "a reaction to Jewish Messianism (in the form of Bolshevism)." Last April, in an article raging about a new president of Notre Dame University, Jones charged that anyone who went to a mainstream university would emerge "with a Jewish world view … and maybe a Jewish spouse." Jones, who has written nine books and hundreds of articles, regularly cites extremist sources, especially the American Free Press run by veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto. He also has taken up race, most obviously in his "Rooted Culture" conferences that include a trip to Germany. The 2005 trip theme would be familiar to any neo-Nazi -- "the continuing deracination in Germany." Jones has one other line of business that would be familiar to the racist right: the "neo-ethnic songs" he sells as part of a bid to create what he calls a true "Volk" music."

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/br...

Sounds to me like his "theory of the Jews" stupidity didn't exactly evolve too far from his "theory of the blacks", eh?

> Diversity + Proximity = War

And now...let's see here now...such an elegant little equation for Hacker News here and all...concise...and war...sounds harsh...so, according to the 2000 census, the following U.S. cities were more diverse than Detroit: Long Beach, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Sacramento, San Jose, Chicago, Dallas, Anaheim, Newark, San Francisco, Miami, Riverside, San Diego, Fort Worth, Boston, Honolulu, Santa Ana, Milwaukee, Denver, Austin, Tampa, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Tucson, Corpus Christi, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Cleveland, Buffalo, Arlington, Norfolk, Charlotte, Washington, Minneapolis, Kansas City, St. Paul, Omaha.

So they should all be war zones - that's what your equation tells us, eh? Yugoslavia. Bosnia. Ethnic cleansing in all those cities much more diverse than Detroit. Isn't that the phrase in the title of E. Michael Jones little racist book you keep leaving off for some reason: "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing"?

Horseshit.

As I wrote in the previous post, Jones wrote that book before he started writing about Jews. Since you refuse to draw the implied inference, then I will do it for you: I disagree with E. Michael Jones about the Jews; I think that E. Michael Jones is wrong about the Jews. Think before you post. If I agreed with Jones about the Jews, then why would I bother pointing out what time he wrote which opinion?

Since that's settled (I hope), you should try to refute the claims of Jones with which I agree rather than those with which I disagree. But you don't even try. You go for point & sputter. Why don't you pull a Godwin while you're at it?

Furthermore, the fact that I agree with some of a persons opinions does not imply agreement with all of that persons opinions. Pick any of your heroes; almost certainly they will hold at least one opinion which you find repellant. I won't hold that against you. One would think that that would go without saying around here. More the fool I.

As for Diversity + Proximity = War, that is rough description. In order for different groups to be in conflict with each other, they must be within striking distance of each other.

Take a closer look at those supposed counter-examples which you site. In Los Angeles and other cities of southern California, Hispanics have been in conflict with Blacks for a while. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/homicidereport/2007/03/march...

New York City has had friction between not only races, but ethnic groups for a long time. Have you heard of the movie Gangs of New York? It was based on a non-fiction book written in 1928.

I'll keep this post as short as I can and invite you to fire up your favorite search engine and enter "racial tension X" without quotes, substituting one of the cities in your list for X. It does not make for pleasant reading.

I know nothing of the book that is being mentioned here, but various policies in the mid-20th century DID force the breakup of the traditional ethnic neighborhoods.

It's not an issue as simple as black and white. I live in an area that in the 1960's had thriving Irish, Italian and Polish catholic communities. Community being the key word -- these folks lived, worshipped and attended school together. They were tight groups of people, who still maintain ties today.

The reality of this is a loss of community in general -- read the book "Bowling Alone", which describes the decline of civic life in America, and isn't written by a kook. My children are almost certainly not going to know the names of more than half of the people who live in our city block with about 40 homes. In my childhood (back in the 70's and 80's), we knew everyone.

My kids play with 5 other families on my block, and we know many, many more of our neighbors than that. I'm literally a stone's throw from one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago. Here's a suggestion: instead of blaming your alienation from your block on the breakup of old racist† '60s ethnic enclaves, reach out to the people on your block. They'll appreciate it. Set up a block party. Collect email addresses from your neighbors and start a mailing list. Do a neighborhood watch. Talk to the other parents on the block and set up a movie night.

† That's what they were.

I'm glad that you're so progressive, but you happen to be the exception. You also are reading what you want to, and not what I said.

The nationwide trend is that social interaction between Americans has been in decline substantially in recent years. This is pretty much across the board. Again, read Bowling Alone, or skim a review of it. These are quantifiable facts.

You can apply whatever judgement that you want, but the fact is that ethnic communities were and in some cases still are true communities that people feel a part of. Your suggestions are also great ways to build a community based on commonalities other than language and culture.

The review I remember reading of Bowling Alone contrasted its example of declining urban bowling leagues with the surge in urban soccer leagues.

Commentators since de Toqueville have observed that Americans are remarkably strong at forming leagues and clubs around their interests. Some go away and are replaced by others. Isolating half of this process ("some go away") as some kind of indication of social rot is purely in the eye of the beholder.

As a counter point, I left Detroit in 2005 and I've lived in Toronto and Portland. Not a day goes by that I wish I were still living in Detroit or its suburbs.

Metro Detroit has a lack of good public transit. Everything is spread out, making biking annoying to impossible. I don't even think that the drivers would know what to do if they saw a bike on the road other than: 1) attempt to run down the rider or 2) swerve wildly into other lanes of traffic.

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