1000 Detroiters duped thinking they were getting a free home

originally posted by: NeuronDivide


They're mostly 50 square, 3 story, solid brick houses, too.

Buy a couple of the vacant blocks around you and fence it all off, put in a water tank and throw a bunch of seeds everywhere. You'd be self-sufficient in no time at all, and do it on the cheap!

I have friends that buy houses cheap in disrepair and fix them up to be good rentals. Some have upwards of 20 house like this. Though Detroit/Chicago has 1000s, most likely, of rundown houses like this they would not touch a single one. The cost to do what they want to do is way too much even if they bought the houses for a buck.

a reply to: pavil

Man.. that is just surreal.

Elicits unknown memories of being someone who lived there. So different to the housing here.

Gah now I need to reset my head...

originally posted by: andy06shake
a reply to: Blue Shift
Are the gaols not busting at the seems over there though?
Not enough places for the criminals already in custodial facilities.
So rounding up 1000 of the poor suckers might be somewhat a touch of overkill. LoL

You can't just stop arresting criminals because the jails are full. That's why we need to outsource our prisons to Siberia, just like we outsourced all the car manufacturing. Set it up a couple thousand miles from anywhere. Don't even need walls or guards. Just drop in supplies occasionally. Our prisons are nothing but crime schools anyway.

originally posted by: SummerRain
a reply to: pavil

Man.. that is just surreal.

Elicits unknown memories of being someone who lived there. So different to the housing here.

Gah now I need to reset my head...

Yeah, it's pretty sobering knowing that all the places of your childhood are almost all destroyed. It looks like that for blocks upon blocks.

Don't get me wrong there are some good areas of the City, but wide stretches of it are like this

a reply to: Blue Shift

Which is why you really need to stop jailing people for stupid crimes that could be punished via community service, fines, and/or social work orders.

My own nation shares a similar dilemma.

Don't get me wrong criminals should be punished but not taught to be a better criminal via gaol college.

If you ask me we incarcerate the wrong element anyways on both sides of the pond as the real criminals are the bankers, politicians, nevermind the high ranking Police.

They should be thankful they were duped.

Cause they would have had to pay income tax on that 'windfall'.

Then property taxes.

If they were so destitute to begin with.

There woulda been no way to keep it.

originally posted by: andy06shake
If you ask me we incarcerate the wrong element anyways on both sides of the pond as the real criminals are the bankers, politicians, nevermind the high ranking Police.

"White collar" crime is always the way to go.

I'll tell you part of Detroit's problem.

The functional illiteracy rate is well over 50%, but the city government thinks it needs to provide business cards for the janitors at the city library.

originally posted by: rollanotherone

originally posted by: wantsome
I'm not black but I know what it's like to be poor.

I'm surprised no one's called you on this. I personally don't care but I'm sure some people might be offended. Either way, cheers buddy!

I am also not black and I also know how it is to be poor, I was for a while. Also I am not american and yet I feel like having to say it like that is weird and other things, does not look right somehow

originally posted by: ketsuko
The functional illiteracy rate is well over 50%, but the city government thinks it needs to provide business cards for the janitors at the city library.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it read.

a reply to: Blue Shift

Depends on one's definition of "White Collar".

None of our respective nations have there own Poppy/Coca fields and yet some of the worst Heroin/Cocaine problems associated with the western world.

Those "White Collar" bankers, politicians, Police, and customs officials are the ones responsible for how all that powder lands on our shores.

To be honest they give ordinary decent criminals a bad name with there overtly draconian hypocritical attitude, above the law because they make the law really.

a reply to: Blue Shift

That wasn't even the main gist of my point.

If you are the city government and you know most of your citizens are functionally illiterate ... why are you bothering to get business cards for the janitors of the library? Who are they handing them out to for one, and who is able to read them for two? Are the janitors even reading them?

It's sort of an indication of the deep levels of institutional waste and mismanagement going on there.

a reply to: stormcell

Look up The Shea Show on Youtube.


Start at 1:50 it gets funny.

too bad , they will all have to take their i phone 8s and jump back in their new cars on rims and go back to their free sect 8 apartments now and wait for next months handouts

there is a much darker side to this, that i'm rather surprised has not been brought up yet. you feel bad for people getting duped like this. just off the headline i was feeling sorry for the gullible people.

yet this goes far beyond gullibility. these people were quite willing to break the law to get a house. not to mention selling their votes. which is a very serious issue. in fact i have to wonder if whoever set this up was proving a point.

Maria is one of more than a thousand people that came here under the guise that if they voted to get rid of the current city council and its policies, the hundreds of thousands of abandoned homes in Detroit would be given to them. For free.

text italicized by me to show important part.


this was nothing more than a bribe. even worse a bribe for votes/political gain. i have to wonder if these people who showed up could, and possibly should face criminal charges? there showing up is evidence that they were willing to take a bribe to overthrow the currant council. and i'm pretty sure that is against the law.


yet at the same time we have recently seen such bribery and promise of bribes being acceptable in elections. not just acceptable, but it works. just look at Obama phones. which was obvious vote buying. even Bernie's promises of free higher education and such is a similar bribe.[i]"vote for me and i'll reward you something of monetary value for it". a very serious problem that needs to be dealt with.

a reply to: generik

They're called "gimmedat" voters, and it's hardly a secret they exist and will vote for whoever promises them the biggest chicken for their pot.

originally posted by: ketsuko
It's sort of an indication of the deep levels of institutional waste and mismanagement going on there.

I understand what you're talking about. But a few useless business cards here and there isn't what is ruining the economy. It's demographics and history, and you can't change that. Detroit was a steel / automobile boom town and then thanks to the forces of capitalism winning WWII (yay!) Detroit lost its competitive edge to countries more willing to poison their environments and enslave their workers (boo!). So the boom is over, and now it is becoming like an Old West ghost town.

But what do you do with generations of people who were used to sucking on the steel / auto teat who don't realize they need to pack up and go someplace else? Detroit should have an active program to take decayed suburban neighborhoods and turn them back into farmland or forests, and then reconsolidate around a significantly smaller central city core.

Eventually. Obviously, it wouldn't happen overnight.

a reply to: Blue Shift

Like I said previously, Detroit is a huge city area wise. There has been talk of turning the sparsely populated parts of the city back to nature, removing the roads ect. Detroit proper at one time had a Million people, now I would guess the population is about 400K in the city. Lots of room for green spaces.

It makes no sense to provide services to a neighborhood that only has 30 scattered houses.

a reply to: Blue Shift

What Detroit needs to do is reinvent itself, but they didn't do that. Hard to reinvent when your best ideas are to give your library janitors business cards.

Successful cities have to constantly find ways to make themselves new. The things that made Detroit an attractive place for the auto industry would make Detroit an attractive place for other industries, but the city has to adapt itself to lure those new industries in.

They didn't do it, so they're a shell of their former self.

Not seeing why anyone would fall for this.
If you want a free house in Detroit just evict the wildlife/homeless out of one of the thousands of abandoned houses.

Not like the police will kick you out.