Comments for A Post Apocalyptic Look

A Post Apocalyptic Look

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:12:54 -0600

I have personally, never been to Detroit...

Comment from BillT on 2009-12-24

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:41:10 -0600

I was expecting more traction on the FP3 video

That thing's been around for at least a month. They picked a bad time to release it -- the week right before 140 executive jets, 1,400 stretch limos, and 40,000 CO2-emitting watermelons descended on Copenhagen for the Climate Confab...

Comment from BillT on 2009-12-24

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:22:45 -0600

Heading South down Michigan Ave you pretty quickly start to see... gaps. Spots that don't look right. You really do find blocks with no houses, or just one.

Remember the movie, "Fort Apache: The Bronx"? Detroitization and random acts of residential *exhuberance* resulted in the precinct house being the only standing building within a three-block radius.

The cops re-christened it "The Little House On The Prairie"...

Comment from Sean Maloney on 2009-12-23

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:05:03 -0600

I just have to say....wow! It reminds me of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, or Bosnia when I was there in 1995. I can't believe this is a North American city.

Comment from Beth on 2009-12-23

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 10:11:38 -0600

It's been a couple of years since I have been to the Detroit area. I traveled to Dearborn for work a few times when I was at Cerner. Detroit was scary for me, driving alone.

Dearborn was also scary, mostly because it's almost completely Arab, and all those women walking around in burquas was distressing.

Comment from fmr_grunt on 2009-12-23

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:07:10 -0600

As someone who has spent a very great majority of 46 years living and working around and in Detroit I can atest to the fact that it is all too easy to find places to shoot video like that posted above. Many of the empty lots and ruined buildings seen on the video probably started on the path to ruin during the riots in 1967. The train station shown at 00:32, 12:11 and12:47 was an absolutely beautiful building in the early years of my youth (a rival of the rejuvinated Grand Central in NYC). It has been empty for many decades and is a very appropriate symbol of the dysfunctional governments and current conditions in the City. The building should have been torn down well before I reached the age of majority yet it still stands and every few years there is a push by the city government to find someone to redevelop the building and land. No rational developer will touch it for numerous reasons. (The building has been stripped by vandals of all valuable metals etc and is basically an empty shell and the city departments involved in permitting such work are a real inhibitor to work being done.)

Even with the giant swaths of land vacant within the city limits there are still thousands of empty building that should be demolished yet only the budget for 1200 / year (and a permitting process that makes a couple day job last more that a week or two. If you are ever in Detroit and want to see a very depressing site take the drive suggested earlier in the comments and go from downtown past 8 mile on Van Dyke. It will open your eyes to the effects of big government supported by big unions.

The schools are as bad as Crowder stated yet all efforts to enable school choice are very effectively resisted by the teachers union. An offer of $200+ million from a MI philantropist to be used to enable school choice was rejected about 5 years ago by the city. The Detroit public school (DPS) district spends roughly $1200 dollars more per pupil than the district I grew up in and my children attend (the Grosse Pointe school district) yet is so totally ineffective that attending DPS has become a ticket to poverty and life long dependance on the gov't. In contrast the Grosse Pointe district is one of the best in the state sending roughly 90% of its graduates on to college and maintaining a graduation rate in the upper nineties for over the last 4+ decades. The charter school that runs out of the old Catholic school at my church (on the border of GP and Detroit), one of the few charter schools that has been allowed in the city, maintains a graduation rate of 97% with a matching percentile going on to college. It draws its children exclusively from the same population as DPS.

I must take issue with Bigmack's relation of the black white divide. While race relations have played a huge role in the destruction of the city (very often encouraged by those in Detroit city government - i.e. Coleman Young (who was reputed to have been a Tuskeegee airman back in the day) the starkness of Bigmack's assertion is no longer true. When I was growing up it was, I only know of one black kid that attended the Grosse Pointe schools while I attended (his dad owned an auto dealership). I graduated in 1981. Now there are many minority children in every school with at least one elementary school in the district being majority black. What was the white flight of the late sixties and early seventies could much more properly be called the middleclass flight. As it happened at the time the middleclass was white. Over that last number of years the middleclass flight is majority black (Detroit was forced roughly ten years ago to eliminate the restriction that city employees live in the city). With the loss of that restriction those who can have left. I coach on my son's youth football team (9-10 year olds). To be on the team you must live in Grosse Pointe and Harper Woods (a neighboring city). Roughly one third of the team was black and three of the six coaches were black (2 Detroit police officers and a firefighter). They all left the city in search of better schools and safer neighborhoods.

Kevin has made the point. This is what happens when Dems have unrestricted power for decades. Crowders point at the end of the video is true. Detroit and other cities mentioned by Kevin have been a decades long experiment in Democrat rule and they are all ruined. This is the journey the current Congress and President would like to send us on. It must be stopped.

I apologize for the length of the post. It is a subject near to me.

Comment from Kevin on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:51:59 -0600

Judging by the results, it was about as effective as the reconstruction efforts in the afore-mentioned cities. Bodes well for the future, don't it?

touche'

Comment from John of Argghhh! on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:20:26 -0600

Heh. Reconstruction didn't take everywhere, did it?

Comment from Kevin on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:55:03 -0600

Hooo'kay. Since no one else has made the obvious, though, unspoken connection of poverty, ignorance, crime, tyranny and the resulting social/economic shambles. I shall.

One need look no further than who and what has presided over the ruination of once great American cities. Detroit, STL, New Orleans, Washington D.C., et al, ALL have been under the control of the Democratic Party, their lackeys and their dependent, parasitic voting blocs.

Now that all the above are in control of the Federal Government, and, given their record of positive results...... considering that 'they' wish to duplicate and exceed their accomplishments in these cites....

Mebbe that Bonny Blue Flag doesn't look so 'bad' afterall?

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

Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star!

Comment from The Thomas on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:59:54 -0600

Lets provide some context to the pictures provided by Time.

The Michigan Central Station was the Grand Central Terminal of Detroit housing the terminal and corporate offices of the Michigan Central (a sub of NYC). Think of that vacant building above the terminal as the empty offices of GM or Ford. Same sort of thing as the upper stories have been largely vacant since the mid-60's.

Second picture, William Livingston House, used to have its picture under Urban Ruins from back when it didn't look like it was going to fall down. Think of the lakeshore area in Evanston IL and those gracious houses. But it is no more.

Check out the Fort Shelby Hotel at http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/index10.html This is the "hotel" they put me up in when I went for my pre-induction physical. It was a little nicer then, not much, but a little.

So much of Detroit has been torn down or burned down. (Think Devils Night.) What a shame. Even 20 years ago, coming in on the John Lodge (the big ditch), there were many boarded up and spray painted buildings.

Comment from Bigmack on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:58:04 -0600

Having been a Detroit native for my entire 26 years, I can certify that this video was shot entirely within the city limits. In Detroit, there existed a phenomenon from the 60s to the 90s called 'White Flight', whereas middle class whites, who were the bread and butter of the taxpayers to the city, left for the suburbs as the minority populations multiplied and moved into mostly white neighborhoods. As the tax base left the city, so did the money on which it depended.

Its a sad trip through the city... where three out of four storefronts are boarded up or burned out... It seems that every other open business is either a cash advance, hair/nail salon, cell store, pawn shop, or an insurance place. Take a half a block ride off of one of the main drags, and you find the neighborhoods as they appear in the video... homes in shambles, entire blocks without a single structure, street signs and fire hydrants removed for their scrap value...

I don't think that it is entirely the fault of the unions to blame, but their part is no small contribution. I believe that much of the degredation has been over the past 30 years...

If you ever get a chance to come to the Detroit area, drive through the city... and then drive through the (majorly) white suburbs.. like Sterling Heights, Chesterfield, Royal Oak, Grosse Pointe, Troy, Rochester Hills, etc etc etc... Just observe the differences... Its literaly black and white. Pun intended.

One example is that there are no Japanese cars in Detroit. They aren't seen. They aren't acknowledged to exist.

-Not true. On my daily commute from Mount Clemons to Melvindale, I'm willing to wager that one quarter to a third of the vehicles on the road are foreign. It's a sore spot with many Detroiters who feel that the drivers are selling out their neighbors for the sake of economy and/or style.

Comment from Neffi on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:16:40 -0600

'I was expecting more traction on the FP3 video -'
...not enuff snarkitude there for you...? 8^)

Comment from olga on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:15:35 -0600

I spent several hours in Detroit in Summer '02 on my drive to Chicago. Still do not understand why people are living there...

Comment from SezaGeoff on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:05:56 -0600

I was last there in 2007 and took some visitors downtown to the RenCen and the river. When I started back to civilisation, I found that the ramp on to I75 was closed. I took the next best option and drove up Van Dyke from downtown. It is post-apocalyptic down there, with large swathes of the inner city with few houses. You can see it easily on Google Maps, and how quickly it changes once you get up a bit. The movie "Eight Mile" reinforces the surburban Detroiter's exhortation to not go south of Eight Mile and you will be fine.
As an Australian who has travelled reasonably widely, I have never seen anything like it. Even the post heavy-industrial towns of Northern China have been recycled into nicer places rather than be left to decay away.

Comment from KCSteve on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:55:50 -0600

Found that reference - Yosemite Sam over at The Ten Ring:
http://tenring.blogspot.com/2009/12/detroit-and-ayn-rand.html

Comment from John of Argghhh! on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:52:48 -0600

Those are the pics I remember, Fuzzy. I also remember how eerie the train station/hotel looked as I drove by it a couple of years ago. Detroit is very sad, for many reasons.

Interesting on what caught your collective eye today. I was expecting more traction on the FP3 video - though a lot of the Army folks can't see it at work, true enough.

Comment from FbL on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:36:29 -0600

Notice the lack of cars in the last photo linked above...

Comment from FbL on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:34:31 -0600

Photos from Detroit: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089,00.html

Comment from KCSteve on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:24:19 -0600

Follow up:

Because I can, I pulled up the Google Maps on my cellphone (Droid) with satellite view on. I searched to "Detroit, MI", zoomed on in and scrolled around. Heading South down Michigan Ave you pretty quickly start to see... gaps. Spots that don't look right. You really do find blocks with no houses, or just one. There are a lot of them.

To get sense of proportion I popped the view back to Kansas City, MO and scrolled on down the section between Troost & The Paseo, heading South from Brush Creek. This is a part of town I generally avoid driving through. (Note: you really can see the KCTV tower from space).

I did find a few 'missing teeth' - spots where houses were obviously gone and not just because someone wanted a larger lot or they put a park in. But they stood out as exceptions, even in this chronically depressed part of town.

I'll have to do more checking on a real computer with a bigger screen.

Comment from KCSteve on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:06:03 -0600

One of the other bloggers I read also recently posted about Detroit.

He likes to play in Google Earth and he noted that you can actually see the city falling apart from space.

This was a day or two before Crowder's video popped up, and since the images used for Google Earth are always running a bit behind, yeah, I'd say Detroit is well on its way to becoming a non-city again.

Comment from Fred on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:51:26 -0600

Detroit is in an alternate reality. It has operated at a high level of denial about reality and a high level of denial about the obvious consequences.

One example is that there are no Japanese cars in Detroit. They aren't seen. They aren't acknowledged to exist.

Comment from MAJ (ret) Kev on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:09:16 -0600

It looks like Eastern Germany after the wall came down. We travelled a bit over there after the Einheit. It was equally as disturbing. I wonder if, in the future, we will have the same issues West Germany had with cleaning up after the communists?

Comment from fdcol63 on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:55:50 -0600

Glad I don't live there ...... yet.

Comment from Boquisucio on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:42:19 -0600

If that's the case, The Democratic Party has done more damage to Detroit, than the 8th Air Force did to Dresden.

Comment from John of Argghhh! on 2009-12-22

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:37:11 -0600

I admit that at the moment I can't see the video - but yes, Detroit does have significant swaths of urban terrain that looks a lot like German cities in 1946...