Opportunities in Detroit?
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt
Opportunities in Detroit?
Detroit has lost about 60% of its population since the 1950s peak of about 2 million.
About 50 square miles of Detroit is so thinly populated that the Mayor wants to pay for people to move to more densely populated neighborhoods so the area can be abandoned for municipal services. No trash pick up, no police patrols. The first and second ring of suburbs are facing much of the same plight, and some may be headed for bankruptcy..
One idea for reclamation is urban farming, but that assumes people will not move into Detroit any time soon.
So does the 50 square miles provide us with an opportunity? New neighborhoods? New types of communities? A special immigration zone? Homesteading by young people? Entrepreneurial zones? If so, where do we get the money (Detroit and Michigan both being in various stages of broke)? Who leads the charge?
This is a country full of smart people. We should be able to think of something creative here.
Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt
Just want to add one destructive point: Urban farming is quasi religious nonsense. Theres no utility for society whatsoever. Farmland is prettier than skyscrapers, but much less pretty than natural land or parks. Lets just be happy that people at least have space in Detroit now if nothing else and let the farmers do their job just where they are now?
Years ago I was playing around on the internet and looked into buying an island. To my astonishment, I found that you can actually get a developed island in the Phillipines for less than $100,000. I was going to get one!
Of course, after doing a little more research, I found that if you move onto a island in the Philipines, you better have the resources to defend it from pirates with automatic weapons.
I think of moving to Detroit a lot like that.
Talk to Disney. 😉
Tomorrowland!
How about starting an automobile industry?
Is not raising food utility for society. Detroit would be good land for Orchards, such as apple and peach. Note that an orchard can if managed right also function for some park usages. In fact I suspect that it might make good grape land, at which point one asks what is the utility of wine?
Peaches and grapes on the Canadian border?
What about Homesteading? Detroit might buy up the worst of the distressed properties in that dismal 50 square mile region, and offer say 1/2 acre lots to people who agree to repair the buildings, keep up the yards and streets, and stay in residence for at least 5 years. Factories and schools and warehouses and other abandoned commercial property might be given away or sold for a pittance to entrepreneurs who promise to upgrade the property or make it available at low cost to people who do so. Create value where there is no value!
This doesn’t put hardworking auto workers back into middle class neighborhoods, just like the 1950’s, I concede. And it wouldn’t seem especially fair to the poor souls who actually stayed on in Detroit, paying their mortgages and their property taxes over the years, with little to show today for their diligence. But it might bring in retirees willing to accept the rigors (and costs) of a Michigan winter in exchange for free housing, and self-employed younger people willing to convert abandoned school buildings into artist workspaces and dance studios and the like.
So Michigan wouldn’t be gaining much from the property taxes these people wouldn’t be paying? It’s not getting much now, is it? These people would be state residents. They’d be paying state taxes. They’d be buying groceries and gasoline and clothing from Detroit-area stores, improving the livelihoods of other Detroiters. They’d be building up a stock of worthwhile real estate, instead of letting what was there deteriorate. They’d go to sporting events for enjoyment rather than smash police cars. They might even go to music concerts and plays and art galleries and send thier children to local schools. They might actually have a decent life in Michigan and improve the lives of their long-established neighbors.
Actually Peaches are grown in the Detroit area. I recall an Orchard in Oakland county that is no longer there for example. Recall that Detroit is about 42 42N which is even with Southern Oregon, and the grow grapes in Washington. If you look at Michigan Winery listings you find listings even in the Upper Penninsula. Livingston Oakland and Macomb counties have pick your own orchards for peaches, and all are north of Detroit. So it is clear that Detroit could return to growning peaches (I suspect if you went back 110 years you would have found a number of peaches orchards in the area that is now the city of Detroit.) Also of course you could grow sugar maples and make maple syrup in Detroit as well.
Hi. Econ blogger One Salient Oversight here. I have published an article which examines the monetary base and how changes in it when compared to inflation can be used to predict recessions.
http://one-salient-oversight.blogspot.com/2010/12/using-monetary-base-as-recessionary.html
Please feel free to comment there. Thx.
the northeast shore of lake erie was once all vineyards…all the great lakes moderate seasonal temperatures giving areas like northeast ohio a longer growing season than tennessee…
Well, you can buy a house in Detroit fror $1,000. The only problem is that the City then tries to charge you $5,000 and up a year in taxes to occupy it.
My suggestion would be to lower City taxation, so that Detroit is actually a cheap place to live. We could then simply allow market forces to deal with how many people wish to/do not wish to live there.
The question is what would these folks do for a living? That is the big issue that caused the problem in the first place, lack of jobs. Better to put the land in either tree farms or orchards.
Its hard to see what industries would move there, given that manufacturing is going to continue its reduction in the jobs needed to make goods.
Tim:
Taxes are and have been cut to where the taxes in Royal Oak are cheaper there than in Detroit. The issue as Bing proposes is a concentration of the city which legally is going to be hard to do. I am not sure the city can just abandon land that has paid taxes to be serviced.
You may pay $1000 for your home; but, the local tax assesor will value (and not cost) your home otherwise. If homes within a reasonable distance have sold for more then your buy with be valued at more.
Lowering the taxes is a race to the bottom. A better way to handle it is increase the tax base.
I’d love to see the great lake region. I know it is good ag land, I would have thought that peaches usually set too early for such cold climates.
The republican an party has lied to voters form the start. In 1860 Republican candidates duped working class whites by telling them they would not have to compete with blacks either as slaves or freemen, because republicans would limit which states would allow slavery and would also enforce the fugitive slave act. This was obviously a lie and working class whites got screwed by the republican party from the start.
mike,
Sorry won’t work. Old folks can move to Florida and skip teh harse winter. The schools suck and would take a total cleansing and removal of the entire school apparatus to fix. Plus changes to Michigan law. This isn’t gentrification of black neighborhoods in DC. Plus you have to convince people that the change would actually happen. That would mean a new city government that was pro-busness and corruption free. Not going to happen.
People can get a better deal elsewhere, with far lower risks. As a first step you would need to clean up city government, make Michigan a right-to-work state and add lots of business incentives.
And even then the factories will open in Mississippi…
Islam will change
The southeast shore of Lake Erie continues to grow an abundance of grapes. Grapes are a major crop from just west of the OH – PA border to nearly Buffalo.
How about this for ideas:
Fire all government workers not directly involved in fire, police, sanitation, and road/infastructure maintenance. Everyone not fired takes a 10% pay cut. Max pay for any city person is $150K, including overtime. Hand over city museum/art area to the state to run until Detroit comes back up to speed.
No more city spending on anything but teh basics. Tax the sport teams.
Decertify all public employee unions and make them illegal.
State take-over of the schools including control of the budget. Removal of all personnel that are not currently teaching in the classroom and replace with new non-Detroit living people (new blood). Close and consolidate schools where possible, killing the worst performing ones first. Fire the bottom 10% of the teachers.
Make the Wayne county area plus any Detroit city areas outside Wayne county a right-to-work area (preferably do this state-wide).
Kelo style evictions to clear those 50 square miles, un-incorporate the area and turn into a state park(s).
Go with the home give-aways listed above, and tie property tax to the price of the home for 5 years and then let it change normally but no more than 5% up per year.
Offer free land, no city taxes for 5 years to any business that will relocate into Wayne county and and employe at least 20 people.
That may give you a chance.
Islam will change
I lived in the Detroit area for 3 years and I’m still amazed at how misrepresented it is by reporters. Yes, areas of the immediate downtown area are decrepit and the part north of downtown is crazy scary. But there are large and affluent suburbs like Birmingham, Huntington Woods, Bloomfield Hills, the Gross Pointes, etc that have many young professionals who commute to the downtown area for work.
If you could somehow create an environment in the downtown area that would make them want to skip the commute on the worst-paved freeway system in the country and avoid the huge delays in the winter, some would probably do it.
What might that entail? Surely lower property taxes for a while would help that, but its more about safety and crime more than anything else. If you lived downtown and could walk or ride public transit (the People Mover is embarrassingly small an needs to be expanded), you could easily get to Tigers baseball games, Red Wings hockey games, Lions football games, and a multitude of restaurants and music venues.
So the financial incentives mentioned above in regards to housing are interesting. But they won’t do a thing until you address the crime/safety issue. And that means not only removing a portion of the abandoned housing stock, but hiring more competent and better-paid policemen. Unless something happens at the federal level to help that, I don’t see any point in reducing city revenues (through poperty or business taxes) in a failed effort to lure businesses and people back into the downtown area.
LYLE — They’d be living on their social security or what they make from selling stuff over the Internet or from blogging. (And maybe, for some, selling weed or prostitution but the 5 year stability requirement I suggested would likely eliminate most of the riffraff.) The whole point here is to bring in new inhabitants WHO DON’T NEED LOCAL JOBS, who can get by comfortably because they won’t be paying rent or a mortgage or a local property tax.
BUFF — same point. Detroit ain’t attractive, agreed. Ultra cheap housing is. Get enough people into that cheap housing and maybe things improve. Mostly these would be old folks looking for something more affordable than the typical retirement community — lower class folks on stable small incomes. They typically won’t have young children needing schools; they won’t need thriving factories and hiring halls. They’ll need paved streets and even, kept up, sidewalks and access to supermarkets and health care. They’ll not have patience with city incompetence and corruption — and they will have time and incentives to improve local government. This IS gentrification, in other words. Inevitiably so.
Would “new communities” built as clusters work for the younger type? Would the population density be enough to create safer zones?
But if you don’t need a local job and the weather is not an issue, another place in MI that has suffered a 100 year population decline suggests itself, Calumet in the copper country. In reality the arguement made would apply to any small town in the midwest just as well. In parts of the midwest towns have vacant lots, that used to have houses that work as well as Detroit without the disadvantages of the big city. (Small towns throughout the midwest are loosing population. So the question is what does Detroit provide that a small town say 50 miles from a big city does not. (Assume that UPS goes to the town).
LYLE – True enough, there’s no end of depopulated areas across the Midwest and the Great Plains, and I’d not claim there’s any especial avantage to Detroit. That said, Detroit has an infrastructure — roads and hospitals and grocery stores and the like — that could cope with a substantial influx of people, and could easily be built up to cope with more; Detroit has sports teams and parks and other cultural attractions. Life in wilds of Detroit might be uncomfortable in ways, but people might enjoy some aspects of urban life they’d not find in say a dwindling small town.
Other hand, I’m sure there’s no shortage of people who would relocate quite happily to small towns . Perhaps we could try both tacks.
How about doing like the Israeli’s, build a 20 foot wall around the city, then banish every politician who fails to uphold the laws of the constitution, take bribes, are corrupt, etc. They can even be given an uzi & 2 clips of ammo too. I think that would be hitting 2 birds with 1 stone! Not to take away from the birds.
I don’t have a guess. But I asked a lot of 30-something professionals in the suburbs if they would consider living downtown in some of the newer loft/highrise developments and the answer was usually no, due to the high crime rates. I think that unless you clamp down on the crime, everything else is pointless.
Downtown Orlando is trying something that I think might hold promise (assuming you can eventually get the crime under control). They are subsidizing a high-tech hub for businesses in the old arena area and bringing in developers to build restaurants and condos/apartments to give the youngsters a close place to live and hang out.
Jerome
OK, so buffy claims that a right-wing wish-list is what Detroit need. The villains in buffy’s play are government and unions. Except that Detroit relied overwhelmingly on the auto industry for jobs and a tax base, and the auto sector in and around Detriot is too small to provide enough jobs and related taxes to maintain what is there.
If you can’t maintain what it there, you face high odds that the city isn’t viable. That’s why we are discussing plans to get rid of residential infrastructure and replace it with something else. Maybe, if the money fairy came along and paid to get rid of residential infrastructure, that could happen. Why, though, does urban farming make sense when the cost of that farming includes removing most or all of the residential infrastructure, when undeveloped land can be had for the same purpose?
Why is saving Detroit a goal? What other goals would we have to give up because we use resources to save Detroit? Rusty asks that we use our wonderful brains to find a use for Detriot. An early item on the list of things to think for our wonderful brains to think about is whether saving Detroit is a realisting path toward the most good for the most people.
So, long ago, there was this notion that we should consciously engage in social engineering. We should decide on outcomes we want, and then plan for them. Of course, we have always done that, and the social engineering phase was just an explicitly ambitious extension of what we have always done. However, the explicitly ambitious extension led to some over-reach. One sad relic is large public housing projects, in which we concentrated examples of failure, though that wasn’t the intention.
We continue to plan for the society we want, because we must. We should, however, learn from our mistakes. How many successful examples are their of cities reducing their size and remaking their economic base by design? With apologies to lovers of Adam Smith, don’t we expect the market to provide better results when it comes to sorting enterprises into their best locations?
Buffy’s list of anti-government, anti-labor notions is right-wing social planning, and with a record no better than any other such effort. As in a good many other areas (like the budget), the right knows enough to hide what it’s up to, but a “business friendly” agenda is social engineering, just as surely as bussing is.
We engage in social engineering, but unless we admit that’s what we are doing and take a look at what works and what doesn’t, we are apt to pour resources into things that can hope to prosper.
Offer citizenship to any illegal who moves to detroit and can prove residency in a designated area for a 5-7 year continuous basis. Also, allow more foreign immigrants to move to detroit on the same basis. If you buy a parcel of land in a designated re-settlement zone you can get citezenship. The city sells off the land at reasonable prices that create a significant money investment for immigrants.
Might as well try…
Hey Rusty, just a day or two prior to this post you ended a post about Detroit’s governmental problems with this, “Many, many have suffered, and will continue to suffer.” You painted a pretty dim view of Detroit’s government and suggested that the place was less than hospitable to those without a deep tan, “Why did it take so long to bring justice to Detroit? Could it have been a political correctness issue? Did politicians offer cover for political reasons?” Granted it’s a very indirect implication, but it comes in a context of repeatedly pointing out the troubles in Detroit by name as though no elected officials in the rest of the country ever did a bad deed. Now you’re asking for ideas concerning Detroit’s revitalization. That seems a bit inconsistent.
Judging from the different parts of NYC that I’m aware of and that have gone from worse to better I’d suggest that any economic regrowth is going to get going with the aide of immigrants from south and far east Asia. They seem to be the new pioneers in America and urban centers seem to be their uncharted waters. The real estate is ceap, but not necessarily worthless. They don’t seem to mind hob nobbing with the flotsom and jetsom. They want more for their money and RunDownTown is the way to get it. You won’t find corporate America looking to do any good unless there is a fat tax break involved and plenty of cheap labor. And they’ll only stay around so long as the next delapidated town hasn’t yet offered them a better deal. So its the great unwashed that we’re going to have to count on to rebuild our Detroits all across America.
And they’ll only stay around so long as the next delapidated town hasn’t yet offered them a better deal. So its the great unwashed that we’re going to have to count on to rebuild our Detroits all across America.
Solid Waste Removal
eeiei, Your statement is the kind of quasi ingorant, narrow minded opinion that keeps imaginative solutions from manifesting. Uraban farming solves a host of problems from providing food with a low carbon footprint to providing jobs to allowing local people to grow their own and spend less at the store.
holyrust:
Ever wonder why they plan sunflowers around Mercury Drive and along Southfield and never harvest them? The land is polluted and the sunflowers suck up the pollutants.