Honestly some of those aerials are no more impressive than Phoenix or LA, similar cities from a planning perspective (small lots, grids, right angles). Levittown style single family tract homes. I don't really mourn these losses. Again, they could easily be replaced if society made such a decision.

I suppose I should go in and edit the data out of that 'Metro Detroit' Wikipedia entry. The numbers are not sourced and at odds with the main Detroit entry, which are sourced to the Census.

Yes, that was rare, I din't understand what was happening, until I went tothe two links and realize were different entries with different numbers. I guess you are right, the "detroit" entry seems more reliable, although the links to the sources wont work anymore.

Yes, it seems exactly what already happened in some redeveloped areas, they started from scratch, and wiped out almost everything that was there, including the street layout. Not much different to what happened in other cities when they did urban redevelopments with housing projects, only that this time instead of apartment blocks to lower classes by the public sector, they did predominatly suburban type developments to middle class by the private sector.

This is the Elmwood Park neighborhood, only about 1,5 kilometers east of downtown. in 1940 (from the aerial picture of monkey ronin) and in 2010. As you can see, practically the only things recognizable are Gratiot Ave, E Vernor Hwy, the train trench, the corner of Elmwood Cemetery and the building of the Bunche Elementary-Middle School (in the lower right corner) one of the few buildings that still remain.

The last image is the 2010 one with 1940 grid superimposed.

http://imageshack.us/a/img15/9767/de...dpark19402.jpg

http://imageshack.us/a/img827/20/det...dpark2010g.jpg

I won't be convinced until hudkina fires another salvo of upscale suburban Detroit photos.

I did some work for non-profits studying these outer areas mostly around NE Detroit. For the most part they are or were pretty stable at the time as you show. Neatly cut lawns, and many streets had low vacancy. But what we were discovering is that vacancy was picking up at an alarming rate. Essentially we were tasked with providing an emergency plan. Have a housing condition survey and template that would either categorize houses for "save" or demolish. We also provided a plan to help protect houses that had become vacant. All the home in good condition are very valuable assets. Well built and will stand for another century so as long as people don't break in and trash them. The issue is there's so little resources to maintain vacant buildings and residents nearby have their own problems to deal with, let alone maintaining a vacant home next door.

But yeah, I don't think many people realize there's plenty of intact neighborhoods in the city. I think it's because so much of the neighborhoods around the core have emptied out and that's all people see.

Let me ask this - where are the middle class black neighborhoods of the city? How much of the city percentagewise is PG County or NE DC style, relatively stable African American nabes?

Northwest Detroit is the middle-class, relatively stable black area. If you want to poke around Google Streetview, look between Woodward and Livernois, from McNichols to 8 Mile Rd., or around Grand River/Fenkell, or around Sinai Hospital (or really anything along Outer Drive in NW Detroit).

But Oakland County, just to the north of Northwest Detroit, has a number of middle class, majority black areas, especially Southfield and Lathrup Village.

southfield!

I'm sorry, I guess it was rude to post pictures when someone specifically asked to see them...

I certainly appreciated the pics! good stuff

9.3% of Metro Detroit's black households earn at least $100,000. Of the 25 metro areas with the largest number of black households, it ranks 16th, putting it at the lower end ahead of just Orlando, St. Louis, New Orleans, Tampa, Birmingham, Jacksonville, Memphis, Cleveland, and Cincinnati.

In raw numbers, it ranks 11th behind New York, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston, Baltimore, Dallas, and Miami. Just under 34,000 Metro Detroit black households earn at least $100,000. In comparison, nearly 28% (145,000) of Washington's black households earn at least $100,000. I would bet that within the next decade or so, Washington will have more black households earning at least $100,000 than even New York. It already has the highest percentage among major metro areas.

So while Detroit certainly has quite a few black middle-class (and upper middle-class) neighborhoods, I wouldn't necessarily compare it to Washington. Few cities can generate the type of wealth you see in Washington.

So the only non-hispanic white majority part of Detroit left is that tiny section attached to the northeast corner of Hamtramck? I also imagine greater downtown Detroit and perhaps the hispanic section on the southwest side must have significant white minorities.

Developers really aren't building much in the parts of Chicago where very high murder rates prevail. Similarly, most of Detroit's new activity is clustered in the corridor from the downtown riverfront up past Wayne State and into Midtown. That's one of the safest sections of the city.

But wide areas are just not safe in the least. A 70-year-old man in Detroit was forced to shoot two assailants recently in a school parking lot because he was being robbed while escorting a couple of schoolgirls to a car. That's not the sort of thing most people want to have to deal with when they choose a place to live. It's no fun to have to be on your guard with your hand on your pistol just to walk around outside in broad swaths of your own town.

Well, it's by census tract. And for much of the city, the population numbers for a census tract are so low that a majority isn't really that significant.

The one by Hamtramck on the map has 1,268 whites and 1,073 blacks out of 4,000 residents. And actually, that map is misleading because there's 1,213 Bangladeshi and 400 Asian Indians (1,613 Asians). That's a majority Asian census tract! :haha:

The downtown area is the same deal too. Each census tract, at most, has about 4 or 5 thousand residents and maybe a few hundred of them are whites.

It makes me very sad to see how a once great city has been brought to it's knees.

The economic dislocation certainly was a factor but that happens to many cities but they don't implode like Detroit. Detroit's demise has far more to do with corruption, horrid planning, and racial tensions.

Cleveland, which is often compared to Detroit has managed to turn it's economy and prospects around. It has a long way to go but it's downtown and Euclid corridors are booming. It's downtown has become one of the most vibrant, liveable, attractive, and welcoming in the US and the same can be said of Pittsburg.

Clev/Pitts invested in their citiy's urban transit systems, downtown liveability issues, and acknowledged that their economy of yesterday is gone forever, accepted it, and have moved on. They also worked more dilegently on racial issues that contributed to their declines. Cleveland city population's decline has recently ceased and the downtown population is growing faster that it has in decades.

This is pretty much Exhibit A re. my general point. I don't get it, but I guess perceptions count more than reality.

None of this is supported by data ("worked more dilligently on racial issues"; "city population decline has recently ceased", "managed to turn economy around") but people go with it nonetheless. The Census data doesn't jibe with the narrative.

hudkina's right. detroit is totally ok. it's how we should be. broken windows and meth winos in the empire state. because westchester is loving life.

I'm sorry. Where did I say Detroit is totally ok?
What I don't understand is that if I'm not actively participating in Detroit-bashing, than people are under the impression that I don't see or acknowledge the massive problems the region and especially the city have faced. Just because I am still optimistic about certain aspects of the city's future, doesn't mean I don't recognize that large chunks of the central city are in utter ruin, crime and poverty endanger the prosperity of the remaining neighborhoods, and the central city's financial collapse is looming. Yes, Detroit is the worst major American city. I FUCKING KNOW! Don't you think I and every other person who chooses to live in this region know that? Do you really think we give two shits that there are 15% more young adults in Seattle? Do you think we care that Cleveland has more miles of rail transit? Do you think that being constantly reminded that we are the laughing stock of middle-class, white wannabe-hipster is going to change how we feel about our city? We don't care. We live our lives, regardless of where we rank in the latest armchair analyst's data-ranking on why we should move to Seattle or Dallas or Atlanta.

I've already heard about the Great Migration but I didn't think it was so important. I mean, it's a really huge growth in Black population between 1950 and 1980. Also, why was it apparently more important in Détroit than in other northeastern american cities ? And, on another scale, why Blacks moved predominantly to the inner city and not to some suburbs ? Why did it happen essentially after the WW2 and not earlier, because I guess it was already not that cool to be a Black in the South in the late 1800's or in the early 1900's ?

1980 was the first census after the Great Migration officially ended. Detroit's black population did not grow abnormally compared to other northeastern or Great Lakes cities. There were two distinct parts of the migration: pre-war and post-war. Both parts were spurred by the need for low skilled industrial labor in the north. The 1970s brought the beginning of de-industrialization and thus the end of the need for large amounts of low skilled industrial workers in northern cities.