Driving Through Detroit At Night

Discussion in 'West Mall' started by Clean, Aug 24, 2016.

  1. Clean

    Clean 5,000+ Posts

    Remember the violent, crime-ridden, futuristic Detroit pictured in the 1987 movie Robocop? Well, viewing this video, it looks like Detroit is about ready for Robocop right now. As an added benefit, Robocop could solve the police-race issues. An automaton that used a set of predefined logic rules to enforce the law without regard for race, creed, or religion.



    Oh, and they've had 50 plus years of leadership by Democrats. Last Republican mayor was elected in the early sixties.
     
  2. Seattle Husker

    Seattle Husker 10,000+ Posts

    The problem in Detroit is that it's a dying city. Has any civilization figured out how to cope with dying cities?
     
  3. huisache

    huisache 2,500+ Posts

    detroit is home to and totally dependent on an industry that has shrunk radically. There is no alternative industry to hire people and most of the wealth and people who can pay taxes have left. So the tax base has shrunk radically and there is nothing to do but watch the place strangle. Those who could easily depart have done so. Those still there are the wretched of the earth and descend.

    I was driving thru central Mexico right after NAFTA passed and wondered how those campesinos out plowing their corn fields with mules were going to compete with the Kansas farmers. They weren't was my surmise and I was correct. The Mexican small farmer now lives in a hovel in one of the overpowered cities down there or is cutting my neighbor's yard or washing dishes at the restaurant I am getting ready to go to or killing cattle at the local slaughterhouse.

    The worker in Detroit whose job disappeared has no US to swim to and stands around burning trash and drinking beer on some cruddy road in Detroit or if he is in a bad mood runs over some imagined foe.

    Sucks to be left behind by history.

    The democrats who run the city are worthless but they are not the reason the city is strangling.
     
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  4. mchammer

    mchammer 10,000+ Posts

    Industrial farming for Detroit.
     
  5. Seattle Husker

    Seattle Husker 10,000+ Posts

    I'd argue that the same situation happens in small towns too as major employers move out. You end up with a shell of a rundown town with only the people incapable or moving (or refuse to) sitting on their dilapidated porches drinking cheap beer and consuming tobacco products profusely. Drive across Nebraska and you'll see this over and over as the agriculture business moved from family farms to corporate farming.

    We often talk about manufacturing jobs leaving the US as a reason for these situations. They didn't leave, they got automated. In Detroit robots replaced humans. In Nebraska, planters that can plant 16-20 rows replaced equipment that planted 6-8 at a time. One person can now work 1000+ acres where my grandfather had a large farm working 350 acres.
     
  6. Htown77

    Htown77 5,000+ Posts

    Actually the Detroit Metropolitan Area population has grown every decade until reaching it's current level of over 5 million people. Meanwhile the population of the City of Detroit has dropped from 1.8 million in 1950 to 600,00 this decade. Why? White flight and de facto segregation.

    image.png
    Blue Dots: African Americans
    Red Dots: Caucasians

    Detroit was recently listed as the second most segregated city in America behind Cleveland and ahead of Milwaukee. It seems like these northern cities could use a school bussing program supervised by federal courts to straighten out their communities.
     
  7. huisache

    huisache 2,500+ Posts

     
  8. huisache

    huisache 2,500+ Posts

    drove to my rural south Texas hometown yesterday on business and saw the same. Ag is strangling, the navy base shut down years ago and it is just outside the Eagle Ford Shale area. The population is a little less than when we moved there in 1955. Lots of little gangsters in the little towns because there is not much incentive to do anything useful and the military gets the kids who don't go to college; so what is left is what is left.
     
  9. Clean

    Clean 5,000+ Posts

    Sure because the feds have such a great record of straightening **** out.

    Besides busing inner city kids out to the 'burbs, a busing program would probably entail busing suburban kids into the sh--hole that is Detroit. And who'd want their kid to endure that?

    My niece lived in a nice neighborhood in South Carolina. It had a public school within walking distance. After forced busing was implemented, she was suppose to take an hour long bus ride into the slums to attend a run down city school. My sister elected to send her to private school instead.

    Your Federal Gov. is working on a solution to this problem now. HUD, under San Antonio's own Julian Castro, is trying to mandate that new suburbs have a certain area set aside for Sec. 8 housing. That way they can spread the ghetto throughout the 'burbs instead of concentrating it in the inner cities. Developers who don't comply can be charged with discrimination.
     
    • Like Like x 5
  10. huisache

    huisache 2,500+ Posts

     
  11. huisache

    huisache 2,500+ Posts

    where did Julian go to school? The same place as the president and the future president and a few of the other worthies who blessed us with Viet Nam etc.?

    I know some around here have tired of me bashing the Ivy Leaguers but the arrogant Best and Brightest keep popping up with ideas that are sure to perfect mankind and alleviate all suffering and injustice and all that is not fair.

    Where do Obama's kids go to school? The nice public schools in DC? I think not.
     
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  12. NJlonghorn

    NJlonghorn 2,500+ Posts

    When I was in Florida on spring break from law school in Michigan, I noticed something interesting. I lived in Bellaire at the time, but I figured no one know where Bellaire was, so I'd just say I was from "Houston" or "the Houston area". The same would be true of most cities in the US.

    In contrast, people from the Detroit suburbs would say they were from Grosse Point, or Bloomfield Hills, or whatever. If someone asked where in Michigan that is, they'd say it is in the southeast corner, or they'd do the hand-pointing thing. Sometimes, they'd say it is on Lake St. Clair, as if anyone would know where that is. But the word Detroit would never come up.

    In most cities, there are enough rich neighborhoods to contribute to a decent tax base. In Detroit, there is a hellhole in the middle, and a bunch of rich suburbs that have all of the good jobs and want nothing to do with the hellhole. This decimates the tax base, leaving the city proper with little opportunity for improvement.
     
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  13. Roger

    Roger 1,000+ Posts

    The actual city of Detroit has not been run down due to any reduction in the size or the auto industry it has been run down because it is easier/cheaper/smarter to move your business to the suburbs than subject yourself to the corruption of the leaders of Detroit.

    One of these days a developer will be able to just buy up the whole city and raze it and start over.
     
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  14. Sangre Naranjada

    Sangre Naranjada 10,000+ Posts

    Kingsville?
     
  15. iatrogenic

    iatrogenic 2,500+ Posts

    Start by not electing Democrats.

    And why did whitey move to the suburbs?

    Detroit at a glance: Primary Cause-50 years of Democrat Mayors. One of which was a member of the Communist Party, and one of which was convicted of racketeering and bribery. Mayors supported by Congressional Democrats (John Conyers and Carl Levin)despite their criminal behavior. Overly inflated property taxes. Union support for raising corporate taxes. Teachers Union fighting reforms (once forcing the rejection of a $200million gift from a "rich guy" that would build 15 charter schools); Promises that "the rich" would pay for it all! Black rioting (1967) that caused 140,000 people to move out of city. Auto Union wages and benefits 54% higher that foreign auto maker's wages; poor quality autos.

    Effect: rotating brownouts; median income just over half of rest of Michigan; high murder rate; failing schools; municipal bankruptcy; 47% of property owners didn't bother to pay their overly inflated property taxes in 2012;40% of street lights don't work; unfunded pensions for public workers; $300 million+ budget deficits; 82.7% of population is black and 47% are functionally illiterate. 98% of them voted for Obama because they just can't get enough of those Democrats and their "progressive" policies.
     
  16. Mr. Deez

    Mr. Deez Beer Prophet

    I don't blame liberals for Detroit's economic problems, but I do blame them for not trying to solve them in any meaningful way. It's not the fault of liberals that foreign auto manufacturers produced higher quality cars for lower costs and undercutting Detroit's economic base. However, other regions that have had one dimensional economies that fell apart or scaled back sharply found ways to diversify to weather economic adjustments. It usually involves better educating the local workforce, maintaining an orderly society, and fostering a business climate that is conducive to entrepreneurship. In other words, it involves the opposite of what Detroit has done over the last 60 years. Frankly, Texas is a good example. The oil industry has its booms and busts, but the reason Texas doesn't turn into Mogadishu (except Waco) when oil busts is that Texas's business climate is favorable to all kinds of business. So though it hurts when oil tanks, it's not catastrophic.
     
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    Last edited: Aug 26, 2016
  17. Clean

    Clean 5,000+ Posts

    Unfortunately, it seems the whole country is heading for decades of Democrat leadership. Eight years of Obama. Now crooked Hillary up by 10 points in the latest Quinnipiac poll. Doesn't bode well for America.
     
  18. iatrogenic

    iatrogenic 2,500+ Posts

    I blame them 100% because they are in charge of the City's budget. As stated before, pretending like you are not responsible does not forgive accountability. Making bad revenue projections, deficit spending, sweetheart deals for municipal pensions, and, basically, acting like Democrats and socialists always results in financial ruin.

    [​IMG]


    There wasn’t any one thing that brought Detroit’s pension funds to this low point. Bad decisions were compounded by bad luck, and sometimes decisions that seemed sound wound up causing more problems than they solved. ...

    The city has struggled to meet its pension obligations since the 1950s. Post-war Detroit invested heavily in infrastructure, shortchanging the pension funds to pay for those improvements. Then came the auto industry recession of the late 1950s, leaving city finances in a tailspin, and leading to the first city income tax imposition.

    For elected officials, frequent defaults on pension obligations to save operating cash became something close to standard operating procedure. So far, it hasn’t affected pension checks, which are paid out of money that was invested years before. But it blows a hole in the 30-year projections and long-term solvency, and it requires bigger payments from the city than would originally have been necessary. ...

    Detroit officials have also made a habit of convincing unions to accept pension sweeteners — shorter terms of employment required, more generous multipliers, or a “13th check,” essentially an annual bonus — rather than pay increases. But that has raised pensions costs and had the unintended effect of shrinking the city’s work force to the point where employee contributions can’t keep pace with the needs of current pension recipients.

    By 2005, the city was forced to borrow $1.4 billion to plug a hole in its pension fund, and everything really collapsed with the financial crisis in 2008. So now that the city's has declared bankruptcy, many of those retirees could take a big cut to both their pensions and health benefits.

    Detroit, like the U.S., is run by government morons that line their own pockets at the expense of future (or in Detroit's case current) generations. These fools found it easy to borrow money to pay for government pensions just like the Fed. Govt. has gone on a debt rampage to fund B.S. programs. Those chickens will all come home to roost one day soon.
     
  19. Roger

    Roger 1,000+ Posts

    A couple of notes on items above that I don't agree with:

    1) Detroit's problems have little to do with the automobile industry. The industry is still there and doing alright. It just isn't in the city of Detroit. It is in the suburbs and surrounding areas. Hell even some of the foreign automakers are in Northern Ohio and getting parts from the different companies in the Detroit area.

    2) Fraud among the local politicians was just as bad or worse than the policies that they implemented. Above it was stated "Mayors supported by Congressional Democrats (John Conyers and Carl Levin)despite their criminal behavior." I would take it a step further John Conyers didn't just support but was married to one of those who actually went to jail for taking bribes.

    The city is a sad tale of how not to run a city.
     

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