{"id":563,"date":"2014-03-27T21:51:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-27T21:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/03\/yep-detroit-is-pretty-much-hopeless.html"},"modified":"2014-03-27T21:51:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-27T21:51:00","slug":"yep-detroit-is-pretty-much-hopeless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/03\/yep-detroit-is-pretty-much-hopeless.html","title":{"rendered":"Yep, Detroit is pretty much hopeless"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

So we\u2019re visiting my parents in Detroit for a couple days (yeah, we had The Talk with them about moving to a condo; they replied \u201cwe\u2019ll think about it. \u00a0But that\u2019s another story), and we headed out to the Detroit Historical Museum for the afternoon. <\/p>\n

Well, it was a short visit, actually, as it\u2019s a fairly small museum: \u00a0the Streets of Old Detroit is a nice reconstruction of Detroit in the 1900s, 1870s, and 1840s, with a general store, a fire house, a drug store, and so on; there\u2019s a room on automobiles the centerpiece of which is an assembly line with a \u201cbody drop\u201d; there\u2019s an exhibit on Detroit history from 1701 to 1901 with a trading post and such; an exhibit on Detroit and WWII, and that\u2019s basically it. \u00a0A few smaller exhibits, and a special exhibit area. \u00a0Happily, it\u2019s a free museum, and it\u2019s not that far a drive, so it works reasonably well as a way to get out of the house. \u00a0If we\u2019d been willing to spend money, we could have gone across the street to the Art Institute, or down the block to the Science museum.<\/p>\n

And on the way back, we decided (we probably wouldn\u2019t have been this daring without a GPS) to engage in some Ruin Porn sightseeing, and headed north without getting on the highway. \u00a0We started off driving through\/at the edge of the Wayne State University campus, but very quickly found ourselves in the stereotypical Detroit neighborhood, a mix of what were once solid brick houses, now a mix of occupied, boarded up, and torn down. \u00a0Then, suddenly \u2014 a patch of nice homes, as we had stumbled upon the Boston Edison historic district (association website here<\/a>, and Wikipedia article here<\/a>). \u00a0It\u2019s a lovely neighborhood, really \u2014 you can buy this home, at 10 Longfellow Street, for $245,000, and it looks quite beautiful inside.
\"facade\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0That being said, it\u2019s the most expensive home in the neighborhood, and if that doesn\u2019t quite fit the budget, there\u2019s another house at \u00a01540 Longfellow, for $4,999. \u00a0Yes, that\u2019s not a typo. \u00a0You really could put this house on your credit card. \u00a0The roof\u2019s caved in, along with other major problems \u2014 but in any other city, the land alone in a major historic district would be worth more. <\/p>\n

Just for fun, the association lists all houses for sale in that district, so you can find one in the right state of disrepair to suit your budget.<\/p>\n

But the spooky thing is that Boston Edison is an island surrounded by ruin. \u00a0I would have expected that it would have been walled off in some way, but it\u2019s a very narrow area, only four streets wide, and as soon as you pass Boston Boulevard, you end up in the same depressing mix of decay, with more boarded up homes and vacant lots. \u00a0How could you feel safe there? <\/p>\n

Consider Chicago \u2014 yes, it\u2019s got plenty of poor areas, the sort where you\u2019re more likely to read about shootings occurring than anything else, where the kids growing up there don\u2019t know anything about what it means to hold a job, where the schools just give free breakfast, lunch, and dinner to everyone. \u00a0But even there \u2014 there\u2019s at least some value to the land. \u00a0Houses aren\u2019t demolished to such a degree that city promoters talk about urban farming as a way forward, and, effectively, shutting down various neighborhoods in the city by concentrating funds on more viable neighborhoods. \u00a0And \u2014 some time ago by now \u2014 I read an article that detailed attempts to gentrify Brush Park, another old, wealthy neighborhood, and, more recently a further article describing the decay as abandoned Brush Park homes were slowly dismantled by scavangers taking every possible piece of scrap metal out of the home.<\/p>\n

So, how does a city recover from this? \u00a0Does<\/i>\u00a0a city recover? <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So we\u2019re visiting my parents in Detroit for a couple days (yeah, we had The Talk with them about moving to a condo; they replied \u201cwe\u2019ll think about it. \u00a0But that\u2019s another story), and we headed out to the Detroit Historical Museum for the afternoon. Well, it was a short visit, actually, as it\u2019s a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nYep, Detroit is pretty much hopeless<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So we're visiting my parents in Detroit for a couple days (yeah, we had The Talk with them about moving to a condo; they replied "we'll think about\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/03\/yep-detroit-is-pretty-much-hopeless.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Yep, Detroit is pretty much hopeless\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"So we're visiting my parents in Detroit for a couple days (yeah, we had The Talk with them about moving to a condo; 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