Left behind
In Michigan:
Brown said that as more people abandon homes, eating away at the city’s tax base and creating more blight, the city might need to examine “shutting down quadrants of the city where we (wouldn’t) provide services.”
From Tam, who notes:
How do you tell somebody “Sorry, civilization is retreating, and unless you want to be left outside the fence, you need to move.”
March 30th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Gee, entire neighborhoods with no police, fire, or EMT resources. What could possibly go wrong?
March 30th, 2009 at 10:16 am
As somebody who’s spent considerable effort revitalizing an urban neighborhood, I’m not particularly sympathetic to the “abandon the cities” mentality. But I also recognize that what’s happening in MI is a bit different and there are peculiar factors destroying those cities that are a bit different than what we face here.
There are countless reasons it makes sense for humans to live in cities…there’s a reason we’ve been building them for 5000 years. We need to make our cities livable. But some might not be savable.
March 30th, 2009 at 10:47 am
“Detroit, 2017. The entire city has become a walled maximum security prison. The bridges are mined, the rivers are patrolled, and the United States police force has everything under control… they think.”
John Carpenter’s “Escape from Detroit”
March 30th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Thank you?
March 30th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Do you have to pay taxes then? I can’t imagine they would still charge you property taxes and then not provide any services.
March 30th, 2009 at 11:43 am
This situation, albeit usually without the large population of local barbarians, has existed in this country forever. It is called living beyond provided services.
Growing up, on a personally-maintained gravel road with septic, we had zero expectation of police or fire service until long after they were needed. The few times we called them, we had to call back an hour later to provide directions to our home, which they could not find. Our power died every time we had an ice storm, our phone was a party line that died every time we had any storm, our road blew out every time we had a heavy rain. I personally shoveled that road back into a passable state more times than I want to think about, from When I could heft a shovel at about age 9 through to 18, when I left home for college.
The body of a carjacking victim was dumped in the vacant lot next door to us (lots are still >1 acre each)just a few years ago, we are that isolated.
My aged mother still lives there, as she has for the past 50 years. Development has surrounded our community with suburbs. We now have sewer service, paved roads (but no sidewalks), somewhat better reliability of electricity and phone service. The police still take almost an hour to respond to any calls; we are still distant from the city, although more developed.
What you do when you live on the frontier is defend yourself, learn self-reliance, and don’t expect services which don’t exist for you. Had Clint Eastwood been 20 years younger in his recent film, I think his neighborhood would have been renovated in a somewhat different manner.
March 30th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Actually, it makes good sense. I lived there. I own property there. Sections are so bad that putting up barricades and fences make sense.
March 30th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
There are well-organized citizens groups who state with no shame that the police are an invading army. These folks regularly throw rocks at EMS and try to down passing helicopters with firearms and lasers.
I say retreat, and let them have their little sections.
There isn’t a person there that pays taxes, anyway.
March 30th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Sounds like the Frontier. Plenty of guns & ammo to fend off the hordes, learn how to jerk meat, kerosene lamps, etc, you’re good!
March 31st, 2009 at 1:40 am
Ok snake, I have to ask why anyone would jerk a kerosene lamp;)
Seriously, I expect most of you here are too young to remember this, but Newark, NJ had the same exact problem many years ago. The high rate of taxation drove business and industry out, so the authorities raised property taxes to untenable levels. People just abandoned their homes. They couldn’t sell a home that owed more in taxes each year than the mortgage payment came to. They certainly couldn’t rent them for the rates necessary to pay the mortgage and taxes. Plus there were no jobs, they had already been driven out by the high taxes, so there was no market for a home in Newark, under any circumstances.
The MSM would routinely film (before videotape) down streets in Newark with boarded up homes that had been abandoned and whole sections of the city looked like a ghost town.
NJ actually did some intelligent things to revitalize the city, but they have forgotten the lesson and it looks as though no one else has benefitted from that lesson either.
Some people just have to sit on the hot stove, before they believe the red glow means heat.
You just can’t fix stupid.
March 31st, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Unfortunately the stupid are determined to make us try at our expense, and numerous enough to get their way.
sigh
March 31st, 2009 at 10:56 pm
http://www.detroitblog.org/?p=405
Didn’t figure out how to link this,but check it out.