The sad state of Detroit: outlook falls with home prices
chicagotribune.com
chicagotribune.com
Are there modern cases of abandonment of a major metropolitan area? (I don't mean losing 50+% of population, or large-scale migration to the suburbs like STL, I mean actual wholesale abandonment of a city).
It seems that with hundreds of thousands of people, Detroit and NOLA are still going to survive for quite a while, but at what point do we just declare a city below critical-mass for survival and start working on transitioning people out?
At some point it has to cost far more to provide fire and other basic service coverage to these heavily-built but sparsely inhabited areas than they could ever hope to return in revenue. Cities regularly clear out large areas for urban rehab or sports stadiums, would it be plausible (if even ethical) to just buy out 50,000 people and ask them to leave?
Remember, though, the actual city of Detroit is only 1/5 of the population of the metro area. While Detroit is failing, the metro area is only hurting. It won't be abandoned.
At any rate, abandoning and ripping down historic architecture and craftsmanship is a terrible waste. Especially if you're just going to replace it with cardboard buildings and fancy facades. I think we'd be better off throwing the money at a group of un-corruptible, "really smart" people. There is a real opportunity to experiment with urban planning, development, and social programs to see if there is any way to turn it around.
If I had my way, I'd just build a wall around the city and turn it into a prison. Imagine how much wealth you could create making reality tv shows "from within the wall."
If 'throwing the money at a group of un-corruptible, "really smart" people' was an actual option, would Detroit be in the state that it's in?
> There is a real opportunity to experiment with urban planning, development, and social programs to see if there is any way to turn it around.
How do you think Detroit got to be the way that it is?
Answering my own question.... http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090301/O...
Once the home is vacated and the locks are changed, McIlvaine can spend thousands of dollars cleaning it up. He leaves it to the sheriff to dispose of what's deemed the homeowner's personal property, while hiring contractors to haul out the trash. He never ever opens the refrigerator, a lesson he learned the hard way after looking in a freezer filled with rotten fish."
http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/mcilvaine/?post...
Here's an anecdote for you: in Nagoya, you can pay $700 a month for a one-room apartment. Not an awesomely located fully-furnished palatial one room apartment, just your generic twenty-something sleeping quarters which is about the size of many Americans' closet.
In my town, I pay $450 a month for a three-room apartment. It was so clean when I moved in that I suspected they had put artificial sparkle on the walls.
The whole of the reason it is cheap and Nagoya is not is that my town, sort of like Detroit, has some systemic economic issues which discourage young people from living there. Accordingly, after graduation they move to Nagoya to work, pushing the price of real estate there even higher and making landlords in my town even more desperate to offload inventory.
No argument, but my statement was shorthand for "supply exceeds demand for good reason", since "supply exceeds demand" is usually the same as "prices are low".
Now, it could be that there's just too few people in Detroit for the property, but from other stories, it would appear that these low cost houses may come without wiring or piping, that having been stolen to sell as scrap or the like, and other forms of vandalism seem likely, too. I'm not saying that there aren't some that are worth it; I'm considering buying a house or two at these prices, myself. :)
I've heard similar things happened in East Boston during the '91 real estate bust. It had been a recently gentrifying area, but when the economy fell, the yuppies moved out, property values fell, and the crime moved in. That made house prices fall farther, so that by the end of the bust, condos that had been selling for $200k were going for $40k.
On the flip side, I used to fly out to Detroit and was interested in some of these $10,000 houses, but we could never work up the nerve to actually go into the neighborhoods out near 8 mile that had them, and I can't imagine living there.
Has anyone on HN been out to Detroit recently? There are many parts of that city that are like a war zone in terms of building/lot damage, and others that I would not go without armed escort. I guess this is just another way of saying the "absolute value" of property is pretty low in Detroit as well.
It's kind of like the "Anti-Paul-Graham-Geographic-Recipe-for-a-successful-startup-community" type of environment.
But one of the interesting things about Detroit is that you're never far from urban decay. Even nice houses, or the revitalized part of Woodward, is at most 2 or 3 blocks from abandoned buildings and boarded-up houses.
There is no major grocery chain in the city, and only two movie theaters
I grew up in a town of 2000 people and we had 2 chain grocery stores. I'm guessing a walmart would be robbed blind, especially with an explicit corporate no-kill policy.
The multiplex is almost always at least somewhat suburban.