Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

I live in Hamilton, ON - basically Pittsburgh of Canada. Well, Pittsburgh with a time-machine back to that confused period when Steel City was on the pivotal moment where it could decay into Detroit or become what it is today.

Local activists and even the CBC point to Pittsburgh as basically Hamilton's to-do list, and former mayor Tom Murphy in particular.

Basically, his approach was this: cut spending brutally, raise taxes (especially parking tax, which improves revenue, cuts traffic, and gets more people into bikes and buses), call in favors from philanthropists, bulldoze the steel mills into profitable waterfront land.

Too late for Detroit to make those changes, though.

View on HN

But I am still left wondering why Pittsburghers not only made different choices than did Detroiters, but made ones that were so vastly superior as to lead to their city's becoming the best town in America even as Detroit transformed itself a post-apocalyptic wasteland whose denizens hunt raccoons for their flesh.

In other words, one cannot really explain why the Western Roman Empire fell if he cannot account also for how the Eastern Roman Empire managed to last another thousand years.

Demographics. Detroit is 82% African and 31% minors. Pittsburgh is 26% African and 20% minors.

And Pittsburgh has not had an insurrection in living memory.

that's a pretty racist statement backed up by no facts or causality. Detroit used to be rich even \w all these "African" as you call them.

I remember reading several articles about massive "white plight" in Detroit. Especially in the middle class.

1950 - 16% black 2000 - 81% black http://historydetroit.com/statistics/

I believe that you mean "white flight," not "white plight," but a good catch on your part nonetheless.

Your first statement is an attempt to demonstrate moral superiority and therefore merits no response. Your second statement is misleading, in that it sweeps under the rug how Detroit's descent into poverty mirrored its changing demographics.

You could, of course, attempt to disprove Daniel_Newby's contention that demographics is at the bottom of this. All that you need to do is provide a single counterexample by pointing out an instance--just one will suffice for our purposes--of a city that became richer or that economically speaking at least held its own even as the percentage of blacks comprising its population grew. This seems like a simple enough task.

I believe Metro Atlanta would like a word with you.

I think that that city is too busy trying to keep the white suburbs from seceding, a move that would deprive Atlanta of its tax base, to have time to talk to the likes of me.

You really believe that? Congratulations, you have identified the greatest market development opportunity ever. Simply recruit a million Africans who are being kept down by racists like me, teach them to be engineers, and retire a billionaire on the recruiting commissions.

Detroit used to be prosperous because blue collar Caucasians and Africans are damn valuable in a world without robots. Now they are cognitively obsolete.

P.S. Bill Gates decided that the problem was that not everybody in our world of shameful inequalities could get a world-class university prep education. He paid out of his own pocket to make the pilot project happen. The result was ... almost no improvement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com