Detroit in ruins

Let's say I lapsed into a coma and then woke up a few years later. (Sorta Steven Segal-ish in Hard To Kill)

If upon waking up from my coma the Doctors came into the room saying: "I'm sorry, Mr. Univac, while you were out, the world ended." And then proceeded to show me these photos, I would absolutely believe them.

Harrowing man, harrowing.

Such a big shame Detroit is so run down yet underneath all the rubbish is such beauty gone yesterday. This city with the right Governor can be rebuilt and see it's once glory days again but would take someone special with real balls.

reply to post by HunkaHunka


This video speaks alot for out perception of Detroit.

www.guardian.co.uk...




Also i think it has amazing potential, all that space, low property prices, lower than average population for a major city. It's great!!

Instead of looking at what state it is in today, we should be focused on how it could look tomorrow

reply to post by SeekerofTruth101

Your unstarred speech rang as hollow as Detroit sadly.

Detroit has been this way for some time now. I used to live off of I-75 and Lafayette, more or less in the hood. Detroit happens to be the most racially segregated city in the world. After the white flight to the suburbs and the inner city decline, the downtown is 80% black with the suburbs being 80% white. Reverse discrimination by black people in the inner city of Detroit is extremely bad...directed at immigrants and whites. It's interesting territory for a white person like myself. That being said, I like Detroit overall and enjoyed my time there. The Detroit Institute of Arts is an astounding place; however, it is surrounded by a well constructed set from "Escape From L.A."

I once drove from downtown to Belle Isle to walk my dog. At a stoplight, two guys came running out in the street, one chasing the other. The guy being chased bounced off the hood of my car, and the guy chasing him starting stabbing him in the back with a butcher knife. Then they kept running. My girlfriend made me turn around and go home...didn't feel like a walk anymore...just another day in Detroit.

reply to post by NewAgeMan


Stars mean nothing to me. I am not here for trinklets. The opportunity to present my view is good enough. And as long as it is there, it will be read and considered, and if even only 1 did it, my effort would not had gone to waste. That's more critical to me than stars, and had often pleaded to save such stars for others who need them.

Cheers!:-)

Originally posted by NeverApologize
reply to post by HunkaHunka

 

The second video hit home man... Reminded me of where I grew up. It's not quite this bad, but CLOSE! The shelled out homes, the shopping cards, roving gangs of Blacks... That sort of likeness.

Anyways, this is the DIRECT result of the following:
- Unions pushing companies away. (Oh right, because other cities/countries don't have unions)
- Liberal "Gimmie a Handout' Democrats (You are not even trying to substantiate that, are you?)
- HIGH taxes (oh right, because manufacturers in other countries don't have high taxes. US has one of the lowest tax rates.)
- Collapse of the infrastructure due to reliance on the Government Hand Out. (How again? What?)

The collapse is not a direct result of any one factor and certainly none of the ones you state above. It started very early on in the 50's when automation and competition drove down the number of people employed by the auto industry. There was also the myopic strategy (or lack there of) to never diversify the industry and when a mostly black political leadership was voted in, many white people put their for sale sign up and went, ignorant of the fact that most of the real power and money was/is still in the hands of white people. High unemployment as early as 1958, lack of investment in attracting other industry, and racism has started the decline that is unstoppable. I'll give you that.

Originally posted by SeekerofTruth101

Detroit is a big city, and its asset lays not only in the land mass, but in its infrastructure already paid for and laid out. Most certainly improvements can be made, but most it will not cost as much as to build from scratch.

The whole city is probably polluted with heavy metals and toxic waste dumps.

Who knows whats leached into the ground?

Seriously the whole city should be leveled and cordoned off, except it probably requires too many permits and bureaucratic red tape to achieve this.

Here's the EPA cleanup superfund list for Michigan.

www.epa.gov...

Isn't that funny how we have all these polluted areas of industrial wasteland?

China is so fuc*ed

Originally posted by MikeboydUS
reply to post by Hemisphere

 

I'm pretty sure that was the plot in Robocop.

The Delta City project if I recall.

Thanks MB. I had not seen that movie. It's like I tell my wife, "If you can think it, somebody is likely already doing it."

The more I think about this, the more I like Detroit and feel a certain attraction to it. Just think about what it would be like, say owning one of those builidngs downtown, and rennovating the first floor and putting something interesting and highly functional in there, and then rennovating the top floor, and living in it. That would be freaking cool! There's a lot of opportunity there for the entrepreneurial spirit, to take something old, and in disrepair, and build a small oasis in the midst of it all, something novel, and functional, where there was only decay! I LOVE stuff like that. And you could drive around and get to feel like Mad Max, and maybe even risk your very life in the process, it's like something out of a movie.

That's it, I'm going there!

If I had the dough right now, I'd be there in a heartbeat setting up a restaurant and comedy club, for starters, and then maybe a call center or something like that, as well as an armor-plated tourist bus for taking people into the belly of the beast.

Don't you kind of get that sense, that of possibility and opportunity..? That's what I see there.

Wow - If it was near my home I would totally take some of those books from library and piano too.

Otherwise it's sad and charming in the same time - dying cities - post-apocalyptic feeling to in that kind of places.

Like Fallout 3.
^__^

Watching that video really gets me mad and depressed at the same time. Watching that video gave me flashbacks of how alleys and streets looked(minus the big stand alone houses) in cities like Mogadishu and Djibouti, which is the depressing part. Also depressing is wondering how many Americans in this country really have no clue about just how bad Detroit is. Detroit isn't the only city that is suffering this bad. Baltimore, Cleveland, Newark and Philly are just a few others who have areas that are just as decrepit and boarded up as Detroit.


I have to admit that I sometimes wonder why such wonderful humanitarians like Bill and Melinda Gates insist of giving their billions to countries overseas when it's obvious that our own cities could definitely use those donated billions as well. I'm not saying that the people who receive the Gates' money don't need or deserve it, because they most definitely do as well, but it would be nice to see some Patriotism from them and have them give some money to people and cities here at home. They could start entire businesses from scratch to put jobs back into Detroit and other cities who desperately need them. It could be a really good thing........

What is conspicuously missing here is that Detroit did not produce. It was the automobile hub of North America and reigned supreme for decades until consumers looked more closely at the final product. Their cars, or I should say the big 3, were primarily junk for the most part and the winning tradition continues even today. The big 3 never took their competition seriously and were enslaved with subsequent union demands, ridiculous wages and stupid expectations. Really how can you afford to pay people that type of money for putting screws in cars. The big 3 did not adapt and well we've clearly seen where that went, government bailouts (sans Ford but they are junk too). Yes tariff and import laws hurt them as well in terms of an unfair trade advantage but the big 3 simply sat back and soaked up what little money was left.

brill

Originally posted by lnr42
reply to post by NadaCambia

 

Originally posted by NadaCambia

Originally posted by Ellen15
Detroit looks like the aftermath of being bombed - War Zone

Are these images really that shocking to people? There's tons of English towns and cities in the North that look just like Detroit.

Without the crack epedemic and drive-by shootings, it must be said

Are you absolutely sure of this?

I have lived in several cities in the UK, north and south, and have never ever seen devestation like this.

Which cities in 'the ruined north' are you referring to exactly?

I can understand to a respect, that it's not entirely the same. In that most deprived UK cities and towns never got to the development of Detroit, and in turn, the 'fall' has been less. To be precise, there aren't many 20 story buildings that look such a state. But at the same time, there were never many 20 story buildings.

However, there are many areas in the North of England just as deprived and strucken by poverty and economic collapse as Detroit.

Lancashire and Yorkshire are a great place to start. You can end with Scotland as a whole country.

Originally posted by In nothing we trust
The whole city is probably polluted with heavy metals and toxic waste dumps.

Who knows whats leached into the ground?

Seriously the whole city should be leveled and cordoned off, except it probably requires too many permits and bureaucratic red tape to achieve this.

Here's the EPA cleanup superfund list for Michigan.

www.epa.gov...

Isn't that funny how we have all these polluted areas of industrial wasteland?

China is so fuc*ed

I do agree with your hypothesis that Detroit may be polluted with toxic waste through the decades of heavy industrialization as with any other heavily industrialized areas.

However, toxic waste are only an obstacle, and with obstacles, throughout centuries mankind had thought way out to of the box conceptions to deal with it. So too can toxic wastes be tackled.

Already we have the knowledge to solve problems at the molecular level, and if more efforts be made by our best and brightest youths in ths area, we may eradicate this problem soon, turng toxic wastes into environmental friendly agents instead of the insane and expensive way of canning it and dumping it into the deepest oceans.

And with such technology, the corrupted EPA that only bangs the small time bizmen instead of the big fishes, they will have no more reason to do so.

Originally posted by Imightknow
Watching that video really gets me mad and depressed at the same time. Watching that video gave me flashbacks of how alleys and streets looked(minus the big stand alone houses) in cities like Mogadishu and Djibouti, which is the depressing part. Also depressing is wondering how many Americans in this country really have no clue about just how bad Detroit is. Detroit isn't the only city that is suffering this bad. Baltimore, Cleveland, Newark and Philly are just a few others who have areas that are just as decrepit and boarded up as Detroit.


I have to admit that I sometimes wonder why such wonderful humanitarians like Bill and Melinda Gates insist of giving their billions to countries overseas when it's obvious that our own cities could definitely use those donated billions as well. I'm not saying that the people who receive the Gates' money don't need or deserve it, because they most definitely do as well, but it would be nice to see some Patriotism from them and have them give some money to people and cities here at home. They could start entire businesses from scratch to put jobs back into Detroit and other cities who desperately need them. It could be a really good thing........

To be fair though, Philly does have an upside. It's marred with poverty, but has a decent sense of community.

None (or few) of you understand!

So long as they are not spraying chemtrails in the skies over detroit - this city is sublime.

Contemplated in the right way, Detroit, can produce a type of spiritual experience..

I love Detroit now.

Thanks so much to the OP for sharing this.

I see new life growing in the midst of abandoned buildings beneath blue skies with white clouds, the sun shining down, people walking the streets of downtown (no cars), birds, unusual things to be seen everywhere, at every turn reminding you of sorrows and triumphs, success and failure, decay and new life, and everywhere people in desperate need of a new outlook, a warm smile, the twinkling of an eye, some shared laughter.

If I were an artist or a poet, or a guitar player with some time on my hands, and a way, you'd find me there in the middle of it all, ready to sing a song, crack a joke, and lift your spirits so high you wouldn't know what hit ya!

From now on, whenever I need to bring to presence a simple gratitude and childlike appreciation for life, all I need to do is call to mind Detroit sublime, and there it is.

It's hard to explain, but I tried. If you understand where I'm coming from, please don't leave this post unstarred, thank you.

Originally posted by LarryLove
reply to post by Klassified

 

Where else in the states? Could you point me towards any online photography?

Urban decay as a photographic genre can be a visual drug.

You can go here: Opacity.us

Flickr also has a lot of this style of photography. But you have to do searches for it.

I know there are a few more, but I can't think of them at the moment.

Also, I grew up in St. Louis, theres a lot of this there. But it's dangerous to go where some of it is located.

reply to post by Lebowski achiever


Sorry. I beg to differ. It is a direct result of ALL of the things I stated. The Unions are the main culprit. If they hadn't F'd the companies and held them hostage all of this time, then the jobs would still be there right?

Look at States that are Right To Work, States! Prime example.

Oh and my Conservative view points are 100% proven. Look at Texas... Those "dumb rednecks", seem to be on something. Don't cha think there Haus?

Conservatism WORKS. Liberalism = FAIL. It has been proven time and time again. Entitlement and hand outs KILL cities and communities. It creates reliance and dependence on "The Man".

Ask any person living in the "Hood", who they think needs to fix the problem. Instead of pulling up their britches and rolling up their own sleeves, they sit and WAIT FOR A HANDOUT! It is sad. It is a problem that they helped create. Perhaps they should have voted to not allow the Unions in there in the first place...

Just a few points.

Originally posted by HunkaHunka

Originally posted by Klassified
What's really disturbing is that there are ruins like this all over the United States. Being an amateur photographer, I enjoy this type of photography, but it's still a shame to have these kinds of things to take pictures of really.

I don't think you will find it anywhere near the scale as this...

Detroit is now the most dangerous city in America.

here are more pictures...

edit on 1-1-2011 by HunkaHunka because: (no reason given)

edit on 1-1-2011 by HunkaHunka because: (no reason given)

It's not hard to believe that Detroit would have the most abandoned and decaying buildings in the country. Or the highest crime rate. It's just a shame.

You don't see the media touting the ruins of America, do you. At least, yet.