Did you see The Nightline TV show last night? They featured Flint, Michigan’s urban renewal program - to tear down 6,000 homes. Crazy idea! Nearly 20% of this American city’s housing stock is being bull dozed, and I support the effort. It makes great sense. Reduce supply, improve green space and quality of the homes that remain - property values will rise and people will return to a pleasant city with wide lots and big trees.
I have spent a fair amount of time in Flint (and neighboring Detroit & Pontiac) and there are simply too many vacant and derelict homes, some are being squatted, some are crack dens, some are dog and rat houses, most are just half burned and fourth world.
Recycle the good wood, brick and steal and burn the rest in an incinerator. When I was 10 or 11 years old, I visited my grandparents who lived in a Detroit neighborhood on devil’s night. I remember vividly the fires, and their neighbors watching a house down the block burn - cheering the flames on. I learned later in life that this was a ‘drug house’ and one of many. The flames were getting rid of a cannon ball that was sinking the neighborhood into drive by shootings, drug dealers on corners, theft and generally unsavory folks.
After the home was reduced to charcoal, the criminal types moved to a different street. Devil’s night was an excuse for neighborhood renewal. Now, I’m not advocating arson or the burning of homes, I’m simply relating a story from the ‘olden dayz’ as I remember from my childhood. That’s how problems were solved in the wild west of Detroit in the economically depressed days of the early 1980’s.
Tomorrow night is Devil’s night, and Detroit’s former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has flown back to town (from his Texas mansion) - is the irony lost on me? Detroit at the turn of the 20th century was called the Paris of the Midwest and ‘the city of trees’. It was considerably more beautiful than 1900’s smelly Chicago (which means ’smelly onion’ in Native Indian). Chicago had a horrible fire and was rebuilt. Rome had Nero and Nero had a fiddle.
Maybe someone needs to get Kwame a guitar?
Post a Comment