re: Detroit's Demise: Google Streetview Before and After

Seeing stuff like this reminds me how implausible The Walking Dead is. All of those abandon houses and towns would be in far greater disrepair than what we see on the show. Everything would be overgrown by vegetation

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Detroit's Secretive Masonic Temple

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In a somewhat related note, the Masonic Temple in St. Louis is up for sale for a cheap $6 mil. It's an awesome building and in a decent location right across the street from St. Louis University.

LINK

Entropy at work, pretty cool.

Detroit has been faced with budget shortfalls like many major cities. Nearly every time they have a choice between raising taxes to appeasing the public sector unions or tightening the belt to protect their base, they've chosen the former.

City leadership pushed the tax base out. Manufacturing has become much less labor intensive and certainly less Detroit-centric, but Detroit's suburbs don't look like that. Some of them are actually quite nice.

The city has managed a decline very poorly.

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Oddly enough, Detroit still has nicer suburbs than most southern cities. Certainly more so than BR.

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The longer the decline, the more time available to establish good suburbs. The wealth and many of the best employers are in the burbs now.

Most of the GM jobs at the fancy Warren tech center require engineering or business degrees. A lot of employers have spread to the suburbs like that.

Detroit was hot real estate when "big" southern towns like Memphis, Birmingham, and Atlanta were barely map dots with no industrial base by comparison.

75 years ago, Detroit was a booming cosmopolitan city. They spent a lot of money on some amazing public and private infrastructure, and they had great architectural taste to boot. Over 1.6 million people lived in the city, and manufacturing boomed during the wars in the early 20th century.

At the same time, Memphis, Atlanta, and Houston all had less than 400,000. Baton Rouge was just a rapidly growing bayou town on the Mississippi at that point.

It's shocking how impressive and rapid Detroit's rise as a major American city was, and now it's pretty heartbreaking to see how rapidly it is declining. In just 50 years, it had grown from 200,000 to nearly 2 million. In another 50 years, that population had been halved and is declining rapidly.

In some ways, Houston today is what Detroit was in the early 1900s.

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do you really think melanin is the only difference in blacks and whites????

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it's what we've all been taught from a very early age but with academics,knowledge and higher IQ with age it's really easy to discern that there's something way more different than skin color.