Detroit

[Ke1t]

I'm told the same thing about The Ukraine, The Netherlands and The Weeg.

 

The Nunavut.

 

You know, The Nunavut sounds better.

 

They're missing a trick. I'll need to sort that oot when I get there.

[looksgoodinred]

I'm told the same thing about The Ukraine, The Netherlands and The Weeg.

 

The Nunavut.

 

You know, The Nunavut sounds better.

 

They're missing a trick. I'll need to sort that oot when I get there.

 

feel free to have that conversation with anyone you might find on Baffin Island. i'm sure the conversation will make for a welcome change from the conversations they've had to endure with only themself. laughing:

[ChutneyLove]

Global warming (or more accurately climate change) certainly exists, you can't hide the temperature variances. There are also areas of the world experiencing cooling episodes. In fact the whole planet has had a continually changing temperature regime since time began. This was happening before humans were bumming about and will continue to happen after they've nuked themselves into extinction. You have to look no further than the rock record for evidence. Scotland used to be tropical you know. Before it was cold. Before it was warm. Before it was cold. Before it was warm. Before it was cold. Can you see where I'm going here?

[Ke1t]

Global warming (or more accurately climate change) certainly exists, you can't hide the temperature variances. There are also areas of the world experiencing cooling episodes. In fact the whole planet has had a continually changing temperature regime since time began. This was happening before humans were bumming about and will continue to happen after they've nuked themselves into extinction. You have to look no further than the rock record for evidence. Scotland used to be tropical you know. Before it was cold. Before it was warm. Before it was cold. Before it was warm. Before it was cold. Can you see where I'm going here?

 

Yeah, but the previous cycle of heating up and cooling down wasn't coupled with an industrial society pumping billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. What effect that will have on the warming cycle is anyone's guess, but it's probably safe to say it's not going to give us any particularly pleasant surprises.

 

Bottom line is that Bluto10 is probably going to have to find a pub with an upstairs bar.

[Sonoftherock]

 

Yeah, but the previous cycle of heating up and cooling down wasn't coupled with an industrial society pumping billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. What effect that will have on the warming cycle is anyone's guess, but it's probably safe to say it's not going to give us any particularly pleasant surprises.

 

Bottom line is that Bluto10 is probably going to have to find a pub with an upstairs bar.

 

Climatology is possibly the least understood science of them all. In addition, there are far too many variables to provide even the merest hint of how things will pan out for planet earth. Even if there was, were still probably centuries from developing a super computer powerful enough to model the sheer complexity!

 

It's absolutely true that we've never had a scenario where green house gases have been released in those sort of quantities anthropogenically... However, as far as I'm aware natural phenomena has been responsible for countless natural derived releases of similar and far worse greenhouses gases (both in terms of concentration and effectiveness), throughout the history of the earth. There are obviously heaps of scientific studies which show how industrialisation has influenced global climate, However over the grand scheme of things, the industrial revolution is less than a pin prick on the 4.6 Ga history of planet earth.

 

I'm not worried about Armageddon in the slightest and I reckon Bluto10 will be fine in his current boozer. He'll probably be too drink addled to care either way anyway!

[ChutneyLove]

 

Yeah, but the previous cycle of heating up and cooling down wasn't coupled with an industrial society pumping billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. What effect that will have on the warming cycle is anyone's guess, but it's probably safe to say it's not going to give us any particularly pleasant surprises.

 

Bottom line is that Bluto10 is probably going to have to find a pub with an upstairs bar.

 

Understood Ke1ty boy, but i reckon one mega supervolcano eruption > 200 years of man made shite. It has happened time and time again in the past, with varying degrees of influence on the Earth's climate. It doesn't matter to the planet if we have rising sea levels - they are in fact in an Earth History average at quite a low point - given that we still have polar ice caps. The Earth will survive whether or not humans do for much longer. I doubt very much if humans will proliferate much further, their unrelenting need to destroy one another will see to that. I give humans 150 to 200 years tops - if we live to our natural ages we will certainly witness another nuclear annihilation of some city or the other. I doubt our grandkids will see out there natural lives.

 

We have roughly the same amount of atoms on this Earth (give or take what we've spunked into space and what has accidentally landed here) as we did a billion years ago. And roughly the same amount will be here in a billion years time. It is unlikely there will be any trace of human existence then however, due to the tectonic nature of the Earth's surface.

[The Boofon]

 

Yeah, but the previous cycle of heating up and cooling down wasn't coupled with an industrial society pumping billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. What effect that will have on the warming cycle is anyone's guess, but it's probably safe to say it's not going to give us any particularly pleasant surprises.

 

Bottom line is that Bluto10 is probably going to have to find a pub with an upstairs bar.

No it was natural pollution from the earth going bananas that did that. Also the odd meteorite slamming into earth every now and again.

 

All of this is energy which we all know is only converted and not used. We're not doing anything that nature wouldn't do.

[Henry]

Why do you still stay there, just out of interest?

 

 

The death of a great American city: why does anyone still live in Detroit?

The city’s social contract was shredded long ago and everyone knows time is running out – but some Detroiters have hope

 

Khalil Ligon couldn’t tell if the robbers were in her house. She had just returned home to find her front window smashed and a brick lying among shattered glass on the floor. Ligon, an urban planner who lives alone on Detroit’s east side, stepped out and called the police.

It wasn’t the first time Ligon’s home had been broken into, she told me. And when Detroit police officers finally arrived the next day, surveying an area marred by abandoned structures and overgrown vegetation, they asked Ligon a question she often ponders herself: why is she still in Detroit?

Ligon understands the city’s root problems better than most. She was the project manager for the Lower Eastside Action Plan (Leap), an ambitious proposal to transform vacant land in some of the city’s most blighted areas. But like so many people in the sprawling metropolis, home to the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, she too grapples with Detroiters’ greatest dilemma.

“Do I want to be a part of it, to grind it out and make Detroit liveable for the next generation? I know I probably won’t see it change,” Ligon said. “Or do I want to go to one of these places that is already there? I want to live somewhere it’s not so difficult to achieve simple things. Everything in Detroit seems so hard.”

Ligon has to drive her 12-year-old car wherever she goes, both for safety and due to Detroit’s lack of worthwhile public transit. Unkempt roads make matters even worse. After a water main break last month, nearby streets became too icy for driving, let alone walking. Like much of the city, her area has few grocery stores or restaurants, making food a question of logistics, not just health or taste. Retail options are few and far between: “I have to go outside of my neighbourhood for everything I need.”

Such are the daily quality-of-life struggles in neighbourhoods like Ravendale, the frontline in the battle for Detroit’s future. There is a new sense of urgency to stabilise these communities after decades of population decline, with planners and academics unveiling innovative proposals to combat blight and reimagine the urban landscape, and governments and outside donors pledging hundreds of millions to help. But everyone knows that time is running out. In January, the city's newly elected mayor, Mike Duggan, pleaded with residents to hold on for six more months before moving elsewhere.

“They’re trying their damnedest to hold the line,” said Alan Mallach, a senior fellow at the Centre for Community Progress who has studied Detroit extensively. “But the thing is, for the last 30 years or more, it has been sustained by the black middle class. Now, they’re getting out of there. They’re just leaving.”

The 36-year-old Ligon is exactly the type of resident Detroit is fighting – and struggling – to keep. Raised in the city, she holds a masters degree in urban planning from nearby Wayne State University. Along with spearheading Leap, Ligon speaks serviceable French and Mandarin and even garnered nearly 1,700 votes – roughly 16% of those cast – in last year’s Democratic primary election for her city council district. Now, she consults on green infrastructure development and holds fellowships focused on engaging Detroiters on climate change.

Ligon graduated from Martin Luther King High School in 1996, when Detroit’s population still hovered around 1 million residents. It was a normal place to live then, having established tenuous stability after the struggles of the 60s and 70s amid a strong Midwestern economy and the growing housing bubble. Indeed, between 1990 and 2000, the city's median household income grew 17%, its black homeownership rate reached 53% and the rate of population decline slowed. But unknown to – or perhaps ignored by – many, Detroit's foundations were still fragile. And when both the housing market and domestic manufacturing imploded in the 2000s, that fragility became all too apparent.

Ligon lives near the city’s underused public airport, not far from where she grew up. She moved to her house, a modest, white-panelled bungalow with a detached garage and small front yard, 11 years ago. Back then, she said, the homes on her street were all full. But her census tract lost nearly 48% of its population between 2000 and 2010. Of the eight residential lots on Ligon’s block today, two are empty fields and another three hold homes that are abandoned and left to rot. Though Ligon likes her remaining neighbours – she has two on her block – people here tend to rent their homes, and often stay for as short as a year at a time.

The change has been traumatic, Ligon told me. The roads don’t get snow-ploughed and the grass doesn’t get cut. Some of the vacant structures on her block are unsecured, and it’s hard to say when or if they will be demolished. Every time Ligon leaves her house, she’s wary of who could be inside them; vacant homes throughout the city have become havens for drug dealers and targets for arsonists.

Across Camden Street sits the hulking, two-storey carcass of Macomb Elementary School, closed since 2009 and unprotected from urban scavengers. The mesh portion of the property’s chain-link fence has been stolen, leaving lonely metal posts ringing the property. Portable classrooms outside have been tattooed with spray paint, and dozens of the building’s windows taken. In front of the school stands a tall sign whose bold letters read: “FOR LEASE”.

The city is composed almost uniformly of such inner-city suburbs, low-density developments stretching for miles. Given Detroit’s 60% decline in population since 1950 – including a higher proportion of married, middle-class and well-educated residents – such neighbourhoods are pockmarked by more vacant structures and empty land than a shrinking tax base can handle.

Detroit’s social contract was torn to shreds long ago. Residents receive paltry public services from the local government. And they return the favour. A Detroit News analysis last year found that nearly half of all property owners in the city don’t pay taxes. And herein lies the city’s greatest challenge. Without diminishing the greater downtown area’s modest revival of recent years, as Ligon says: “Until you get a handle on the neighbourhoods, it really doesn’t matter what happens downtown.”

Decision-makers have slowly begun acknowledging the plight of residential areas. Mayor Duggan campaigned on neighbourhoods and has pledged to expedite the demolition of as many as 80,000 abandoned homes. Detroit’s charter was amended to elect city council members from geographic districts rather than a citywide pool, a change that should make politicians more accountable to neighbourhoods. And the state-appointed emergency financial manager has made blight removal and service provision a priority.

Big ideas and heartfelt pledges, however, are worthless without cash to back them up. So private donors have stepped in to partly fill the financial void, funding planning projects and renewal efforts to help staunch the bleeding. Detroit Future City (DFC), a years-long effort engaging thousands of residents and funded by nonprofits, has become the de facto blueprint for shrinking the city and transforming the urban environment over the next 50 years. The Kresge Foundation alone promised $150m to help implement the framework.

Like Ligon’s Leap, which focused on a narrow swath of Detroit, DFC envisions a city with more green space and greater housing options. It assumes population will drop as low as 600,000 – less than one-third of its 1950 peak. The framework makes no attempt to return Detroit to its glory days.

Residential areas and commercial activity would be consolidated in densely populated nodes throughout the city – an effort to provide services more efficiently. The vacant lots left behind would be converted for green uses, including urban farms, woodlands or storm water retention ponds. With such sparsely populated tracts of land surrounding scattered residential centres, the future city’s 139 square miles might physically look more like a suburban county than a typical metropolis.

Planners and academics alike have generally lauded the plan, but it is, of course, predicated on a constant stream of development dollars, better city services – especially law enforcement – and improved public transportation. What’s more, Detroit has a long, racialised history of forced relocation, so convincing residents to move to more populated areas will be no small feat. Many in the city still hope for repopulation, meanwhile, however unlikely that is.

And then comes the logistical challenge. The myriad vacant houses, empty land and absentee property owners have created an unnavigable web of land titles, according to Brent Ryan, an associate professor of urban design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The city has taken some steps to address the problem, creating a centralised Department of Neighbourhoods and citywide land bank. But the existing situation effectively nixes large-scale projects before ground can be broken.

“The tremendous paradox of Detroit is, in a city with lots and lots of vacant land, there’s almost no land for redevelopment,” Ryan said.

The greatest problem with grandiose proposals, however, is that of the ticking clock. There’s almost universal acceptance that Detroit must change. But convincing residents that such change will benefit their lives – and do so today – is another issue entirely.

Quincy Jones, head of the Osborn Neighbourhood Alliance, is one of the skeptics. When I visited his office in January, he said plans such as DFC are overwhelmingly positive – but that the difficulty lies in balancing long-term, overarching visions with quality-of-life improvements here and now. “I like all the big books and big strategies. But if it’s not going to move anything, then what’s the purpose?”

Osborn is a neighbourhood of about 27,000 residents, but Jones’s group is starting small. Last year, it received a $50,000 grant to develop a three-block stretch into a “hub” of neighbourhood activity, he said. It lies in an area that lost about 40% of its residents between 2000 and 2010, according to a census analysis by Data Driven Detroit. The number of families and children in the area plummeted even faster. And today, nearly one in three homes are abandoned.

“Right now, we’re in action mode,” Jones said of his organisation. “Quit planning and get some action going, because folks are still leaving the neighbourhood. They’re saying, ‘Enough is enough.’”

The ‘Live in Osborn’ plan will attempt to use existing resources to funnel as much activity as possible into a small area. It revolves around a community centre that houses dozens of local service providers, including Jones’s. A public library branch and fuel station sit across the street; a vacant lot next door will be paved over for pop-up businesses and youth activities. Perhaps most importantly, the project calls for the demolition of the handful of abandoned homes and apartments that line the three-block corridor leading up to the proposed hub. Nearby residents, most of them living in two-storey brick houses, will help decide how the eventually empty land will be used, Jones said.

Community members have generally been supportive of the plan. They crave what Jones, who grew up nearby, describes as the “wow effect” – any sign of improvement, any reason to hold on just a little while longer. “At times, it just feels like we’re fighting this huge monster, and we don’t know how to chop off all its heads,” he said. “If we just take one part of it and attack it – and if that strategy works – we should keep using that strategy.”

Perhaps Detroit needs a hero to battle its hydra. Perhaps bulldozing tens of thousands of homes will only give way to more that will replace them. If history is any indication – the city has razed more than 200,000 housing units since 1960 – demolition is the easiest answer, though not necessarily the best.

For Ligon, such blight removal will only be as successful as what follows it. Despite building a life and career in Detroit, she admits having thought about moving to cities like Portland or Seattle, where she wouldn’t have to think twice about walking to Starbucks. Like so many other Motor City residents, however, Ligon is trying to hang on.

“I feel like I have something to do here,” she told me. “And I want to do it. The reason this place hasn’t gone entirely under water is that there are a whole lot of people doing whatever they can to save it.”

But Ligon also doesn’t want to be on guard every time her house creaks. She doesn’t want to worry about the empty home across the street whose door remains ajar. She doesn’t want to feel unsafe when she walks outside.

“I’m really getting tired of the landscape that I have to look at every day; of having to fight to make this world a better place for other people to live,” she said. “Who’s fighting for me?”

 

Good luck Kelt.

[looksgoodinred]

On Friday in Detroit, hundreds of local residents and activists — and, somewhat inexplicably, Mark Ruffalo -- gathered to protest what has become an only-in-Detroit kind of crisis: The city's water utility has been shutting off service to thousands of homes, many with the elderly, the poor and children inside.

The story of how this has happened — and on the shores of one of the largest bodies of freshwater in the world — is not as simple as one of government incompetence or indifference to the poor.

The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department says that nearly half of its customers haven't been paying their water bills, for a total of about 90,000 delinquent accounts, leaving the public utility with some $90 million in debt. But in a city of abandoned properties, squatters and tremendous poverty — 38 percent of Detroit lives below the poverty line -- the department has had a hard time distinguishing empty homes from occupied ones, and customers who legitimately can't afford to pay from those who've simply opted not to.

As the shutoffs have escalated, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), who attended Friday's rally, has called the campaign "inhumane". The national nurses group that organized Friday's event has warned that the lack of clean water creates a public health threat. Even the United Nations has weighed in, at the urging of local activists, suggesting that the city risks violating the human right to water by shutting off access to those who can't afford it. All of these fears are also bound up in the deep worry that the city is trying to improve the department's finances at the expense of poor residents so that it can privatize the water system.

in the summer. and when apparently some significant percentage of those amounts owing are from large institutions -- Detroit Lions/Ford Field, the Joe Louis arena, and the State of Michigan's government -- their own fucking state government?

 

and instead they shut off fresh water to thousands of Detroit residents, some who legitimately can't afford to pay and owe relatively small amounts.

 

people need water to live. so good move, Detroit.

 

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/19/the-terrible-choices-detroit-confronts-as-it-cuts-off-water-to-its-own-residents/

[dunc_afc]

Its about time control of the city was handed over to Omni Consumer Products. Dick Jones will soon clean the place up.

[looksgoodinred]

Its about time control of the city was handed over to Omni Consumer Products. Dick Jones will soon clean the place up.

 

might be better than the dystopian society they seem headed for.

[Poodler]

The land of hope and freedom. How does the rest of the state fair? Is it also fucked?

[tup]

I reckon Kelt has never been to Wick.

[Ke1t]

I reckon Kelt has never been to Wick.

 

I don't think I have. What's in Wick that might attract a fella like myself to head off the beaten track and away from the trappings of civilisation?

 

I remember you have a couple of undertakers right next to some butcher's shops, which I found a little alarming. And there was a pub, and an abandoned pink building that appears to have sold furniture at one time. And there was a bit of a hill, if I remember right. Good hill, right enough.

 

Didn't see any water parks, multiplexes, or Computer warehouses though.

 

The land of hope and freedom. How does the rest of the state fair? Is it also fucked?

 

Not really.

 

Michigan is a state about the size of a European country. It's a bit bigger than Britain, and bigger than the likes of Greece, Portugal... about 3 times the size of Austria... and only has a population of around about 10 million.

 

You have to keep that in mind when people say, "Michigan's fucked" and accompany it with a link to pictures of Detroit.

 

Detroit, for sure, is completely fucked. Population has crashed by about 60%, entire swathes of the place are just abandoned and turned over to nature, gangs, and druggies. The population has gone from around 2 million to around 600,000, and of that 600,000 only a little less than half reportedly bother paying any taxes.

 

So you have a city that has an infrastructure built to support 2 million people, but only around 300,000 paying any taxes to maintain that infrastructure. Slowly the city dies as areas are just not funded or maintained,. A smaller and smaller portion of the city has streetlights, cops patrolling, road repairs, while a growing number of areas sees the lights go out.

 

I drove through there at about 8am this morning, and while M10 and downtown were bustling... that's where all the commercial areas including Greektown are... as soon as you get off the freeway and start bumping along surface roads that haven't been patched in 10 years, through areas where the houses are derelict, burned out and abandoned, you see first hand what a population collapse means in real terms.

 

Then you cross into Grosse Point.

 

The difference is immediate and obvious.

 

One second your head is bouncing off the roof of your car as your car trundles over potholed Detroit roads, the next you're in an area where millionaires live, adjacent to their 100k per year membership Yacht Clubs.

 

And there's the thing. While Detroit itself is turning into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the suburbs are full of life, well maintained roads, police stations that look like mansions, and rich white folks out walking 'General'... their custom bred labradoodle, as they teleconference into board meetings using their wireless headsets.

 

Detroit really only represents Detroit, not Michigan as a whole.

 

Flint is another Michigan city which has, if anything, crashed harder than Detroit... but the suburbs are doing just fine. High employment, well maintained streets and roads, effective policing... it's great.

 

Detroit has, allegedly, about 23% unemployment. It's probably closer to 50%. Oakland California has the next highest rate at 16%.

 

Downtown Detroit is safe, the entire area for about ten miles around it is like the wild west, then you hit the suburbs and the white folks.

 

This is quite interesting, and keep in mind that these two cities, Detroit and Grosse Point, are adjacent to each other. On one side of the street is Detroit, on the other GP.

 

[tup]

One thing we have in Wick is air quality, the cities are rank, the smell of human detritus lingers in the nostrils in heavily populated areas.

[Henry]

Bit off-topic, but I see some rich geezer is proposing to turn California into six separate states.

 

http://www.sixcalifornias.com/

[tup]

Aye because he wants Silicon Valley to be independent.

 

Posh nutter.

[daytripping]

Article in todays Mail on lovely Detroit.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2723838/Left-rot-Detroit-s-40-000-abandoned-buildings-awaiting-demolition-decaying-city-nears-bankruptcy.html

[tommo1903]

Does anyone support the Flint Tropics? They are my favourite basketball team.

[Ke1t]

Article in todays Mail on lovely Detroit.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2723838/Left-rot-Detroit-s-40-000-abandoned-buildings-awaiting-demolition-decaying-city-nears-bankruptcy.html

 

I haven't read that, but straight off the bat that headline is factually incorrect.

 

Detroit isn't nearing bankruptcy... Detroit IS bankrupt. The city entered bankruptcy late last year.

 

I've said before, the place is like Fallout 3... the roads and entire city blocks are turned over to nature, gangs, and packs of feral dogs. Heartbreaking like, because some of the houses are just amazing.

 

I want to do some urban exploring down there, but really if you go down there with camera equipment you'd be doing well to make it out alive.

 

Maybe some time in the winter, when the natives are dormant, I might go round and get some pictures.

[looksgoodinred]

i take it everything is drying up nicely/being pumped in time for the Woodward Dream Cruise this weekend?

[caledonia]

what an adventure playground for kids or hangouts for teenagers

Article in todays Mail on lovely Detroit.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2723838/Left-rot-Detroit-s-40-000-abandoned-buildings-awaiting-demolition-decaying-city-nears-bankruptcy.html

 

p.s some of the comments related to that are quite funny

[dave_min]

Anybody see this in today's Daily Hail?

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2723838/Left-rot-Detroit-s-40-000-abandoned-buildings-awaiting-demolition-decaying-city-nears-bankruptcy.html

[Bobby Connor]

Fallout 3 is awesome. Where do I sign up?

[Ke1t]

Fallout 3 is awesome. Where do I sign up?

[tightbreeks]

Glasgow should file for bankruptcy before we become independent.

 

clean slate.

 

but knowing our weegie friends, they'll max out the credit card sharpish.

[zander]

Glasgow should file for bankruptcy before we become independent.

 

clean slate.

 

but knowing our weegie friends, they'll max out the credit card sharpish.

The place is already morally bankrupt.

[daytripping]

i take it everything is drying up nicely/being pumped in time for the Woodward Dream Cruise this weekend?

 

Are you going to the cruise this year LGIR??

[looksgoodinred]

 

Are you going to the cruise this year LGIR??

 

nah, afraid not. giving it a pass this year.

[spamspamspam]

They should maybe make farmland from the space all the offices and houses that are away to be knocked down.