Say It Ain't So Already

Life is Very, Very Bad in Detroit

November 1, 2009 at 5:25 AM Leave a comment

This article from The Guardian about the absolutely horrific state of life in Detroit caught my eye.  It did so because I have been thinking about Detroit for a few days now:  A man called in to the Thom Hartmann radio show last week.  He said he was a doctor and that he was calling from Detroit.  He sounded exasperated as he warned that the psychological state of the people there was rapidly deteriorating.  He said Detroiters were becoming depressed, desperate and frantic about the economic and social situation there.  He said people were breaking under the strain; murders and general lawlessness were rapidly increasing.  It sounded awful — like a no man’s land.

The article referenced above helps one understand why:

Its once proud suburbs now contain row after row of burnt-out houses. Empty factories and apartment buildings haunt the landscape, stripped bare by scavengers. Now almost a third of Detroit – covering a swath of land the size of San Francisco – has been abandoned. Tall grasses, shrubs and urban farms have sprung up in what were once stalwart working-class suburbs. Even downtown, one ruined skyscraper sprouts a pair of trees growing from the rubble.

The city has a shocking jobless rate of 29%. The average house price in Detroit is only $7,500, with many homes available for only a few hundred dollars. Not that anyone is buying. At a recent auction of 9,000 confiscated city houses, only a fifth found buyers.

The city has become such a byword for decline that Time magazine recently bought a house and set up a reporting team there to cover the city’s struggles for a year. There has been no shortage of grim news for Time‘s new “Assignment Detroit” bureau to get their teeth into. Recently a semi-riot broke out when the city government offered help in paying utility bills. Need was so great that thousands of people turned up for a few application forms. In the end police had to control the crowd, which included the sick and the elderly, some in wheelchairs. At the same time national headlines were created after bodies began piling up at the city’s mortuary. Family members, suffering under the recession, could no longer afford to pay for funerals.

And like New Orleans, it is largely being ignored because poor people can’t afford lobbyists.  All they have is a vote, which doesn’t seem to matter much beyond Election Day anymore.

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