Gallery of a graveyard - What a loss.

[Danno 1,228]

Scan through the gallery of a hollowed out city.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/jan/02/photography-detroit#/?picture=370173054&index=0

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

Scan through the gallery of a hollowed out city.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/jan/02/photography-detroit#/?picture=370173054&index=0

Vote Democrat!

[luckytxn 2,265]

Vote Democrat!

They did.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

And anyone else would think it's something of a tragedy, not to mention a national embarassment having a major city fall apart like that.

Of course, only on VJ do folks try to find ways to politicise it.

Honestly, truly pathetic. You guys could really do with waking up and smelling the coffee, rather than the inside of your own toilet.

[The_Dude 1,142]

Vote Democrat!

They did.

Yes, I'm sure that is what caused this. Did the government start giving out free lobotomy's?

[웃 910]

And anyone else would think it's something of a tragedy, not to mention a national embarassment having a major city fall apart like that.

Of course, only on VJ do folks try to find ways to politicise it.

Honestly, truly pathetic. You guys could really do with waking up and smelling the coffee, rather than the inside of your own toilet.

A 4-sentence post. That's a record going back 16 months

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

A 4-sentence post. That's a record going back 16 months

It is in this thread. Someone has to break the chain of dismissive one-liners.

[Danno 1,228]

And anyone else would think it's something of a tragedy, not to mention a national embarassment having a major city fall apart like that.

Of course, only on VJ do folks try to find ways to politicise it.

Honestly, truly pathetic. You guys could really do with waking up and smelling the coffee, rather than the inside of your own toilet.

An even greater tragedy would be to have so many suffer... and yet not one learn from whence the pain came.

... and speaking of-waking up and smelling the coffee?

Clearly your time has not yet come.

[mawilson 2,133]

And anyone else would think it's something of a tragedy, not to mention a national embarassment having a major city fall apart like that.

Of course, only on VJ do folks try to find ways to politicise it.

Honestly, truly pathetic. You guys could really do with waking up and smelling the coffee, rather than the inside of your own toilet.

+1

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

An even greater tragedy would be to have so many suffer... and yet not one learn from whence the pain came.

... and speaking of-waking up and smelling the coffee?

Clearly your time has not yet come.

Only in your world can everything be reduced down to a matter of cartoonish general ideologies that you don't understand but feel the need to blame in order to ignore a real understanding of the real reasons for the problem.

You should really be embarrassed by such a level of argument. Of course you aren't because you are proof of the adage that ignorance and arrogance go here in hand.

Joke is on you.

Edited January 4, 2011 by Ron Burgundy

[Danno 1,228]

Only in your world can everything be reduced down to a matter of cartoonish general ideologies that you don't understand but feel the need to blame in order to ignore a real understanding of the real reasons for the problem.

You should really be embarrassed by such a level of argument. Of course you aren't because you are proof of the adage that ignorance and arrogance go here in hand.

Joke is on you.

The problem with you is.... you wouldn't recognize humor or fun if it slapped you in the back of the head.

Let me remind you again... this is a friggin message board, we are not hammering out national policies here.

Get some fiber in your diet,... seems to work for my aunt.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Problem with you is you insist on personalising everything. And your humour is puerile.

Because urban decay is funny. Right.

[mawilson 2,133]

Only in your world can everything be reduced down to a matter of cartoonish general ideologies that you don't understand but feel the need to blame in order to ignore a real understanding of the real reasons for the problem.

I found this article interesting:

...

What killed Detroit?

The collapse of the automobile industry seems the obvious answer. But is it a sufficient answer? The departure of meatpacking did not kill Chicago. Pittsburgh has staggered forward from the demise of steelmaking. New York has lost one industry after another: shipping, garment-manufacture, printing, and how many more?

Two other factors have to be considered.

The first is the especially and maybe uniquely poisonous quality of Detroit’s race relations. Like Chicago, Detroit attracted hundreds of thousands of black migrants between 1915 and 1960, mostly very unskilled, hoping to gain well-paying employment in factories and warehouses.

Their arrival jeopardized the ambitions of the white working class to raise its wages through unionization. Henry Ford eagerly hired black workers in order to defeat the unions, and in the violent labor clashes of the 1930s, whites and blacks often confronted each other as strikers and strikebreakers.

After the war, the United Autoworkers union tried to integrate blacks into the industrial workforce. But by then automation had begun, and industry’s demand for unskilled labor would first cease to grow, then diminish, then disappear. For many migrants, the promised land soon proved a mirage. Or maybe worse than a mirage. If the promised land did not yield the hoped-for industrial jobs, it offered something else: generous new welfare programs, the ashy false fruit of urban liberalism. The children of the parents who accepted the fruit grew into the criminals who drove first the middle class and then the working class out of the downtown and then altogether out of the city.

As the white working class departed, Detroit became a black-majority city, governed by a deeply aggrieved and flagrantly corrupt political class. Political dysfunction spiraled the city into another cycle of dissolution and abandonment — and the abandonment in turn provided the politicians with fresh grievances.

The second factor in Detroit’s decline is the city’s defiant rejection of education and the arts. Pittsburgh has Carnegie-Mellon. Cleveland has Case Western Reserve University. Chicago has the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and a campus of the University of Illinois. Detroit has… Wayne State.

A city that celebrated industrial culture spurned high culture. The Detroit Institute of Arts is very nice. But it does not begin to compare to Cleveland’s museum, let alone the Art Institute of Chicago. Detroit has a symphony orchestra, but its history has been troubled and unstoried in comparison to Philadelphia’s or Cleveland’s. On the plaza in front of the Detroit municipal building is a huge bronze replica of Joe Louis’ fist and arm, as if to say: “Here is a city ruled by brawn.” Brawn counts for very little in the modern world. The earnest redevelopers who hoped to renew Detroit by razing its history instead destroyed the raw materials out of which urban renaissance has come to so so many other American downtowns. A couple of days after I returned from Detroit, I telephoned a friend who had lived and worked in the city for many years. My friend, it’s relevant to mention, is the son of an Irish cop, ardently Catholic and defiantly conservative. Why did Chicago recover and Detroit fail, I asked. What doomed the city? He thought for a moment. “Not enough gays.”

Detroit confirms the lessons taught by Jane Jacobs and Russell Kirk. Preservation is as vital to urban health as renovation. Indeed, they are inseparable. The preservation of the old incubates the new.

It’s a lesson with application not only to Detroit’s past, but its future. The great factory complexes along the Detroit River have shuttered. America no longer manufactures here. Some will want to rip the factories down. Leave them be — leave them for now as monuments and memorials of the achievements of the past; leave them for the future, when somebody will want them. Want them for what? Who can say? Who in 1950 could ever have imagined London’s Docklands converted into condominiums? Who would have guessed that New York’s emptied toolshops would provide some of the city’s most coveted office space? The 22nd century will put the artifacts of the 20th to equally unsurmisable uses, if only we permit it. Cities can molder for a century or more, and then reawaken to a new era that rediscovers something of value in the detritus of an earlier time. Brooklyn did. So did Miami Beach. Ditto Boston and Charleston — and even more spectacularly, Dublin and Prague. The promise of renaissance may yet come true, even for the ghost city of Detroit.

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/08/04/david-frum-what-killed-detroit.aspx

[Kathryn41 3,205]

Official warning - stop the insults and personal attacks. Further such comments will lead to thread banning. Title also edited to remove the 'baiting' .

Edited January 4, 2011 by Kathryn41

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

I found this article interesting:

...

What killed Detroit?

The collapse of the automobile industry seems the obvious answer. But is it a sufficient answer? The departure of meatpacking did not kill Chicago. Pittsburgh has staggered forward from the demise of steelmaking. New York has lost one industry after another: shipping, garment-manufacture, printing, and how many more?

Two other factors have to be considered.

The first is the especially and maybe uniquely poisonous quality of Detroit’s race relations. Like Chicago, Detroit attracted hundreds of thousands of black migrants between 1915 and 1960, mostly very unskilled, hoping to gain well-paying employment in factories and warehouses.

Their arrival jeopardized the ambitions of the white working class to raise its wages through unionization. Henry Ford eagerly hired black workers in order to defeat the unions, and in the violent labor clashes of the 1930s, whites and blacks often confronted each other as strikers and strikebreakers.

After the war, the United Autoworkers union tried to integrate blacks into the industrial workforce. But by then automation had begun, and industry’s demand for unskilled labor would first cease to grow, then diminish, then disappear. For many migrants, the promised land soon proved a mirage. Or maybe worse than a mirage. If the promised land did not yield the hoped-for industrial jobs, it offered something else: generous new welfare programs, the ashy false fruit of urban liberalism. The children of the parents who accepted the fruit grew into the criminals who drove first the middle class and then the working class out of the downtown and then altogether out of the city.

As the white working class departed, Detroit became a black-majority city, governed by a deeply aggrieved and flagrantly corrupt political class. Political dysfunction spiraled the city into another cycle of dissolution and abandonment — and the abandonment in turn provided the politicians with fresh grievances.

The second factor in Detroit’s decline is the city’s defiant rejection of education and the arts. Pittsburgh has Carnegie-Mellon. Cleveland has Case Western Reserve University. Chicago has the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and a campus of the University of Illinois. Detroit has… Wayne State.

A city that celebrated industrial culture spurned high culture. The Detroit Institute of Arts is very nice. But it does not begin to compare to Cleveland’s museum, let alone the Art Institute of Chicago. Detroit has a symphony orchestra, but its history has been troubled and unstoried in comparison to Philadelphia’s or Cleveland’s. On the plaza in front of the Detroit municipal building is a huge bronze replica of Joe Louis’ fist and arm, as if to say: “Here is a city ruled by brawn.” Brawn counts for very little in the modern world. The earnest redevelopers who hoped to renew Detroit by razing its history instead destroyed the raw materials out of which urban renaissance has come to so so many other American downtowns. A couple of days after I returned from Detroit, I telephoned a friend who had lived and worked in the city for many years. My friend, it’s relevant to mention, is the son of an Irish cop, ardently Catholic and defiantly conservative. Why did Chicago recover and Detroit fail, I asked. What doomed the city? He thought for a moment. “Not enough gays.”

Detroit confirms the lessons taught by Jane Jacobs and Russell Kirk. Preservation is as vital to urban health as renovation. Indeed, they are inseparable. The preservation of the old incubates the new.

It’s a lesson with application not only to Detroit’s past, but its future. The great factory complexes along the Detroit River have shuttered. America no longer manufactures here. Some will want to rip the factories down. Leave them be — leave them for now as monuments and memorials of the achievements of the past; leave them for the future, when somebody will want them. Want them for what? Who can say? Who in 1950 could ever have imagined London’s Docklands converted into condominiums? Who would have guessed that New York’s emptied toolshops would provide some of the city’s most coveted office space? The 22nd century will put the artifacts of the 20th to equally unsurmisable uses, if only we permit it. Cities can molder for a century or more, and then reawaken to a new era that rediscovers something of value in the detritus of an earlier time. Brooklyn did. So did Miami Beach. Ditto Boston and Charleston — and even more spectacularly, Dublin and Prague. The promise of renaissance may yet come true, even for the ghost city of Detroit.

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/08/04/david-frum-what-killed-detroit.aspx

In short...Democrats did it. Other cities were restored by capitalists for a profit.