Quote:
Originally Posted by animatedmartian
I live near the northeast side of the city by 8 Mile and Gratiot. I can confirm that more people are indeed leaving the city. In fact you can see it on satellite images.
One image is from Bing and the other is from Google. The images are only a few years apart maybe even less. On Novara street, you can see that most of the homes are occupied.
However, a few years later and quite a few of them have uncut grass, missing windows and doors, and even some of them are burnt out. These images can't be anymore than 3 years apart. Unfortunately there's not really a time stamp on the aerial views.
Even more telling is that the street view images are dated 2009. The aerial views are probably after 2010.
There you have it folks, urban decay in action.
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While in the meantime NEW residents are moving into lofts in Midtown and downtown. I do not think that anyone doubts that people are leaving Detroit and that decay is spreading, as the inflow in no way caps the outflow. Part of the problem is that the economy has not recovered and people are on shaky grounds...which results in people not being able to pay their mortgage and rent and hence housing gets vacated. The question is where do such people then go? If you lose your job and have to abandon your home....you don't move into a home or apartment in the suburb. Rather, likely you move in with other family members or move back into your parents home. When housing is abandoned, it does not always mean that people have moved out of the city.
Times are hard economically and the unemployment rate for African Americans is around 14 percent nationally and about 30% nationally when you include discouraged workers and those who are working only part time who would like to work full time. So a City like Detroit is really hard hit given that it is 85% black.
In the early part of 2000, Michigan was in a one state recession. This meant that people could easily move to other parts of the country and find work, especially places like Atlanta and North Carolina. However, opportunity in those places have dried up also, unless you have certain skill sets in demand. So unlike in the 2000's, there are not a lot of places to run and escape from Detroit to.....if you do not have certain skill sets. Thus, again, were do the people go?