Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline | Hacker News Reader

Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline

time.com

37 pointscubix17 comments

It's not just Detroit. My parents grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, a couple hours north of Detroit. We went back for a funeral last year and drove around the city. My mom's house was ok, but my Dad's neighborhood was derelict.

Half the houses were literally gone, nothing but empty lots. Apparently there's a crack house epidemic going on where houses go vacant, drug dealers set them up as crack houses and rig them for quick incineration when they get raided, Lots of people die and the houses burn to the ground before anything can be done.

Most of the remaining houses in the neighborhood were vacant, with broken windows and empty driveways. My dad's old house was one of the few still occupied, although the front porch had partially caved in and two houses to the left had disappeared. We'd been planning on knocking on the door and doing the nostalgia thing but we were scared to get out of the car.

There are cities across the nation like this, unfortunately. I'm from Cleveland and it has now ranked as the poorest big city in the nation the last 2/3 years (Detroit took the title the other year).

Cleveland is the city where Rockefeller's Standard Oil began, featured Millionaire's Row, was once the 5th largest city in the nation (now 40th), and featured some of the most beautiful architecture in the world.

That has all been lost to crime, poverty, and urban flight. While the factors listed in textbooks are the decline in the steel market and Rockefeller moving to NYC; the real cause is a lack of innovation. The city should have taken extra steps with the capital it had to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship.

I love my city so much, but I honestly don't know if it will ever rebound now that the hole is dug so deep. Detroit and other cities have fallen victim to the same syndrome and it's a shame.

I went to college in Cleveland (CWRU) and fell in love with the area. There is a certain beauty there that no booming metropolis can match. The old, industrial architecture of the buildings and bridges is amazing. It has that classic beauty that can never be achieved with modern architecture.

I think that Cleveland is able to rebound. Just look at its neighbor, Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is reinventing itself as a new tech hub. Cleveland could do the same. It just needs smart leadership.

This doesn't matter much, but Saginaw is North/Northwest of Detroit.

As someone who grew up in (outside of, but that's the style of Detroit -- no one lives _in_ Detroit) Detroit and takes enormous pride in that fact, it's been funny to see the massive amount of press recently about the fall of the city. I think the rest of the country is just sitting nervously, thinking "what if that happens to our city?!"

The funny thing is, when I was growing up we NEVER went to downtown Detroit. There were basically only two reasons to go there: (1) to watch the Red Wings or Tigers (the Lions didn't even play there until recently, and the Pistons still don't), and (2) to go to the Auto Show. We would just spend all our time in the beautiful suburbs. However, now, when I go back home to visit, it's amazing, we spend ALL our time downtown and talk about how much better it is and how much we love it. Quite the opposite of how the press talks.

If you want some perspective on how Detroiters feel about all this, I highly suggest reading Mitch Albom's article, The Courage of Detroit (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/the_bonus/01/0...). It's long, but try to get through it all.

Thanks for the directional edit. Fixed. The suburbs of Saginaw, at least those where our relatives live, are very nice. You'd never know how bad some of the inner city areas are.

I have a hobby of photographing abandoned places. These photos are amazing. A friend from Detroit has been bugging me to go there for the weekend, but it's hard with a family at home. Cleveland's actually a bit better -- most of the abandoned stuff is commercial rather than cultural and has little architectural value. Of course, a lot of the really beautiful stuff was torn down in the 60's and 70's, and a lot of once great buildings now have lesser purposes.

Once category of sad decay is places of worship. As white people left the city for the suburbs, they built new churches/temples. Their previous buildings were often purchased by urban congregations who couldn't afford to keep them up. Just this week, it was announced that fifty Catholic churches are to be closed within the next year.

Note: I'm an atheist, but I enjoy architecture. So, please don't take this as a religious opinion piece.

There's a ghost town in the middle of Silicon Valley too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawbridge,_California

In Palo Alto, there's an interesting abandoned Sun Microsystems building (http://www.abandonedbutnotforgotten.com/sun_microsystems.htm). It might be gone now or fixed up, those pictures are a few years old.

c.f. the Fi-Times' "The Travails of Detroit" http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2b815a94-0863-11de-8a33-0000779fd2... on the detroit reality gap.

FTA: the $1 houses that still go unsold

Is this true? $1 houses?

If they are going for $1, they aren't tenable. But they do exist. They just don't have anything of any value left inside, might be condemned, etc..

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/19/1-detroit-house-sel...

It is, to large degree, the tragic outcome of dysfunctional tax, educational, and regulatory policy. Newt Gingrich gave an interesting speech on the fall of Detroit last year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNM6HHJTUMM

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a "large degree," but the story of Detroit is more about race than it is about any of those things. (It's also about the auto industry, of course, and poor government.. but those are intertwined with racial issues as well.)

I was born in the Detroit suburb of Garden City over 50 years ago and had lots of relatives in the area. Many of my Polish relations lived in Hamtramck. My father and uncle worked for Ford. In the 50s and 60s, we saw a lot of downtown, but things were on the decline even then. We moved out in 1966.

I came back to Detroit in 1979 as a manufacturing engineer for a company making components for the M-1 tank. Chrysler was the prime contractor, but right about that time, Iaccoca went hat-in-hand for his famous bailout. There were people selling Dallas papers in the median of Woodward Ave. Even then, I spent some time Downtown. The RenCen, Bricktown. But I lived out in Birmingham.

I tear up when I see the desolation that Detroit has become.

What a shame to see so many good buildings left to decay. Are there policies in US to let people use empty buildings? In Argentina, after the 2001 crisis, many factories and other buildings were taken by former employees. Several of those ventures were highly successful. But there was always the danger of the owner to show up and seize everything disregarding the new occupiers. IMHO there should be some legal cover to define a fair solution to this situation. But it is very stupid if society lets such an opportunity escape because of taking private property law too strictly.

Better a bunch of knowledgeable workers as entrepreneurs than a crack and prostitution den.

Viceland's got a compelling set of pictures, too, about a closed high school in Detroit: http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/schools-out-forever...

That is the saddest thing I've seen the whole day

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