17 ms·

My brothers run a property service company that maintains foreclosed homes in Detroit and parts northwest of it. When they need extra help, I ride along with t

My brothers run a property service company that maintains foreclosed homes in Detroit and parts northwest of it. When they need extra help, I ride along with them. Detroit and Pontiac are not the kinds of places that one would care to go by oneself, even for muscular young men. On more than one occasion, we would be approached by "youths" (one of them wasn't even that young) who were clearly drug dealers. One of my brothers confirmed this to me. The smell of marijuana smoke was another tell. Once, we were leaving a property just as several police cars were converging on a group of huddled young men. Those young men had been giving us the evil eye and my brother hurried us out of there. In some houses, the mold grew as tufts of fur spackling the walls in patches bigger than a man's hand. Garbage, broken furniture, and other debris was piled higher than our waists in some houses; the previous tenants had been mentally ill hoarders. We hiked through those rooms more than we walked into them. Last winter, we found a house where ice covered the basement up to a foot below the roof. I stepped on the ice on the stairs going down and my foot cracked through. I missed a cold and putrid bath by catching the walls just in time. When they first went into that business, my brothers were assured that -- sooner or later -- they would come upon a drug house or a dead body. I live in the suburbs. I do not want to live in Detroit.

ryanwhitney 15y ago
Their prediction sounds accurate to me. A few years ago my friends and I checked out the old DPS Book Depository. After walking around, we decided against going inside. Later that winter a frozen body turned up in the elevator shaft. While there might be hope in some new downtown lofts with development spreading outward, the neighborhoods surrounding Detroit are just plain scary, even to drive through.
jacksonpollack 15y ago
Since you tend to go there only when dealing with foreclosed homes, perhaps you aren't seeing some of the nicer places? I have plenty of friends who live in Detroit and love it. I used to live there myself and loved it. Yes, there is ruin porn a-plenty, and many nasty areas. But there are also neighborhoods where you can live for really cheap and be part of a great, caring community. Of course, I'm sure my thoughts on the matter in no way reflect the majority's opinion. I've lived in Toronto for 4 years now, and not a day goes by without me pining to go back to Detroit.
- winestock 15y ago
  Dibble's First Law of Sociology: Some do; some don't. Accentuating the positive is cold comfort. Tenth-century Rome hosted the development of Gregorian chant and papal charters for the first universities. Focusing on those positive developments doesn't change the fact that Rome was a step or two above a cow town compared to contemporary Constantinople or, better yet, first-century Rome. Of course Detroit has nice places and nice people. I saw examples of that and my brothers have seen more. The reason why so many people focus on the ruin porn is that Detroit has so much more of it than most cities of its size. Speaking of size, Detroit has lost more than half of its population in forty years. Satellite photos reveal that the city is steadily returning to wilderness. This happened to the premier heavy industrial city of what was supposed to be the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth. This is a flipping travesty! Similar decline happened to other American cities at the same time. Philadelphia. Saint Louis. Newark. The South Side of Chicago. Parts of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It nearly happened to the entirety of New York. Let's face it, these cities were more livable when they were run by ethnic machine politics staffed by people who squeaked through third-tier parochial colleges. What makes this ruin porn all the more infuriating -- and disturbing -- is that it started when the cool people with the right ideas from the Ivy League schools stepped in. This is what makes us really uncomfortable. We know that it's "incorrect" to say it. The urban renewal and racial integration policies that were ostensibly supposed to improve these cities have utterly and ignominiously failed.
  - ikarous 15y ago
    "What makes this ruin porn all the more infuriating -- and disturbing -- is that it started when the cool people with the right ideas from the Ivy League schools stepped in." Post hoc, ergo proper hoc? I don't necessarily disagree with you, but don't you think that there might be more contributing factors? In particular, the decline of the American auto industry comes to mind in regards to Detroit.
    - winestock 15y ago
      The American automobile industry didn't really get hit by imports until the Oil Shocks of the 1970s. By then, the productive population of Detroit was already fleeing to the suburbs. Also, if the decline of the American automobile industry explains the decline of Detroit, then the suburbs of Detroit would have declined as well, instead of expanding. Furthermore, the decline of the American automobile industry does not explain why similar declines occurred in the other cities which I mentioned.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
moheeb 15y ago
There is a great site called http://www.detroitblog.org http://www.detroitblog.org that goes through many of these buildings and, more recently, features the people that live in these areas. If you are more interested in the building porn I'd go back several years. The human interest stories are also mostly great and are more recent.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
klous 15y ago
I've lived in the Metro Detroit suburbs, and downtown Detroit is the spot right now. The ability to get whatever you need, yes even groceries, within walking distance is a reality. Walking to Tigers games, enjoying the nightlife, eating at amazing restaurants, and enjoying the city are a regular part of life. I live in downtown Detroit. I do not want to live in the suburbs.
- pyre 15y ago
  It is still sort of surreal that right next to the Tiger's stadium there are a bunch of condos, but right next to the condos are a bunch of overgrown/condemned buildings. Also, I've been at the waterfront for the freedom fireworks (combined July 1 and July 4 fireworks display) on the Windsor side of the river and it was a pleasant experience. I'd never consider doing the same on the Detroit side of the river. Though I should note that I haven't lived in the area since 2005, but most of my family still lives there. Edit: Here's what I'm talking about. There are rows of condos right by the intersection of I-75 and Woodward Ave, but to the north there are some empty fields with abandoned houses. At one point those lots (which are now empty) were lined with houses. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=&aq=&sll=42.337277,-83.053401&sspn=0.010167,0.023475&vpsrc=6&ie=UTF8&ll=42.344184,-83.051391&spn=0.005123,0.011737&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=42.344184,-83.051391&panoid=3xjdgQhpCSamXM4PdBz4Tw&cbp=12,335.84,,0,0.25 http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&#38... http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=&aq=&sll=42.337277,-83.053401&sspn=0.010167,0.023475&vpsrc=6&ie=UTF8&ll=42.342718,-83.05089&spn=0.005123,0.011737&t=h&z=17 http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&#38...
- winestock 15y ago
  And if you stay in the Green Zone, then Baghdad isn't all that bad, either. If you stick to the embassies, Addis Ababa is actually rather safe. Stay away from the favelas and Rio de Janeiro is a lovely place.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  "The ability to get whatever you need, yes even groceries, within walking distance is a reality." No offence, but having lived in about 4 major US cities (Detroit not included), that seems to be setting the bar awfully low. Being able to buy groceries is just a basic necessity, and restaurants/nightlife is something every city has.
temphn 15y ago
At the end of World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. They were rebuilt into gleaming cities because they were inhabited by the Japanese. Today it's Detroit that looks like it was nuked. Except it was the inhabitants that nuked themselves, with quaint festivals like Devil's Night. No one has the courage to say what ruined Detroit, or Rhodesia, or South Africa. You have to pretend like it just happened. People get far more angry at those who state why it happened than they do at the drug dealers and criminals who've ruined the city.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Were Rhodesia and South Africa ruined by a sudden and deliberate demographic shift that decimated the region's tax base and created dysfunction in the regions politics, followed by three decades of setbacks for core economic engine for the region mixed with offshoring? Because I thought that's what did Detroit in. Not drug dealers. We have those in Chicago too, but also Boeing and stuff.
  - winestock 15y ago
    That begs the question: What caused that sudden and deliberate demographic shift? What shifted in? What shifted out? Whatever caused millions of people to move out of their neighborhoods must have been intimidating.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      Whatever force caused people to sic dogs on elderly women marching for the right to vote must be very powerful indeed, because it sure would take a lot to make me do something so horrible. Are you sure you want to chase this conversation down this path? I'm happy to just have us agree that economics are what fucked Detroit over.
      - winestock 15y ago
        Read The Slaughter of Cities by E. Michael Jones. I've referenced it a couple of times in this thread. The migration of blacks into Detroit and other major American cities isn't something that simply happened without a cause. That's the point behind the questions that I was asking in the thread to which you are responding. Jones' thesis is that the Brahmin WASPs of the Northeast feared a Catholic takeover of the United States through their high birthrates. They also didn't like the fact that ethnic-dominated unions could negotiate such high wages for their workers. They wanted to break up the cohesiveness of those ethnic neighborhoods and make the children go to secular public schools instead of Catholic schools. So, they influenced former sharecropper blacks to move north with the enticement of better jobs. The sudden population increase to cities that already suffered from post-WWII housing shortages did not bode well for good neighborly relations. Et cetera. Most of the serious commentary that I've read of this book denounces it as a conspiracy theory. Even asking the preliminary questions needed to flesh out the thesis results in name-calling. People see the conversation turn to race and lose it. Spell things out for them and they still lose it.
cosgroveb 15y ago
>> On more than one occasion, we would be approached by "youths" (one of them wasn't even that young) What does this even mean? I am seriously confused. "The smell of marijuana was another tell." Wow, the few times I tried weed in college everyone must have thought I was a drug dealer, too.
- tptacek 15y ago
  In fairness: if you're a white guy a predominantly African American lower-class neighborhood --- particularly Detroit --- and a group of young men smelling of weed are giving you the evil eye, they probably don't want to debate Wittgenstein with you.
- winestock 15y ago
  My brother has more experience in the business and has been in the area far more than me. He called them drug dealers. I trust his judgement on the matter. The smell of marijuana was, like I said, an added tell. EDIT: grammar
  - gnosis 15y ago
    You don't have to be a dealer to smell of pot. It's also pretty hilarious to hear you being scared of kids because they "smell of marijuana". Of course, they probably did smoke pot. But this would earn them a big "so what?" from me, rather than a panicky exit. And if they were giving you "the evil eye", that would make me wonder if you did anything to deserve it. Were you sporting bald heads, combat boots, suspenders, and German memorabilia, by any chance? Or perhaps they'd overheard you talking to your brother about how all the black people had ruined Detroit.
    - winestock 15y ago
      How very droll of you. Maintaining foreclosed properties requires workers to take photographs of the property and secure the building, among other things; especially if the house has been broken into. By the time we get to a property in a high-crime area, the copper is often long gone. Broken glass isn't uncommon. The amount of destruction done to some of these houses is impressive. There are holes in walls and even holes in the floor. Toilets ripped out, shattered, and left to one side. I'm left there asking myself: Why go to all of this effort to destroy these things? What destructive impulse must some people have? It's one thing to argue about it in an Internet forum, it's something else to find it in many houses over the course of months.
dreww 15y ago
On more than one occasion, we would be approached by "youths" (one of them wasn't even that young) who were clearly drug dealers. One of my brothers confirmed this to me. The smell of marijuana smoke was another tell. pro tip for suburban residents: not all black people who smoke marijuana are drug dealers, despite what your brother 'confirms'.
- fractallyte 15y ago
  The word 'black' wasn't mentioned in the parent comment, which makes your reply rather jarring...
  - dreww 15y ago
    it was obvious from that comment alone, and then became overwhelmingly obvious that that is why he was uncomfortable based on his other responses in the thread.

ryanwhitney 15y ago

Their prediction sounds accurate to me. A few years ago my friends and I checked out the old DPS Book Depository. After walking around, we decided against going inside. Later that winter a frozen body turned up in the elevator shaft. While there might be hope in some new downtown lofts with development spreading outward, the neighborhoods surrounding Detroit are just plain scary, even to drive through.

jacksonpollack 15y ago

Since you tend to go there only when dealing with foreclosed homes, perhaps you aren't seeing some of the nicer places? I have plenty of friends who live in Detroit and love it. I used to live there myself and loved it. Yes, there is ruin porn a-plenty, and many nasty areas. But there are also neighborhoods where you can live for really cheap and be part of a great, caring community. Of course, I'm sure my thoughts on the matter in no way reflect the majority's opinion. I've lived in Toronto for 4 years now, and not a day goes by without me pining to go back to Detroit.

winestock 15y ago
Dibble's First Law of Sociology: Some do; some don't. Accentuating the positive is cold comfort. Tenth-century Rome hosted the development of Gregorian chant and papal charters for the first universities. Focusing on those positive developments doesn't change the fact that Rome was a step or two above a cow town compared to contemporary Constantinople or, better yet, first-century Rome. Of course Detroit has nice places and nice people. I saw examples of that and my brothers have seen more. The reason why so many people focus on the ruin porn is that Detroit has so much more of it than most cities of its size. Speaking of size, Detroit has lost more than half of its population in forty years. Satellite photos reveal that the city is steadily returning to wilderness. This happened to the premier heavy industrial city of what was supposed to be the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth. This is a flipping travesty! Similar decline happened to other American cities at the same time. Philadelphia. Saint Louis. Newark. The South Side of Chicago. Parts of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It nearly happened to the entirety of New York. Let's face it, these cities were more livable when they were run by ethnic machine politics staffed by people who squeaked through third-tier parochial colleges. What makes this ruin porn all the more infuriating -- and disturbing -- is that it started when the cool people with the right ideas from the Ivy League schools stepped in. This is what makes us really uncomfortable. We know that it's "incorrect" to say it. The urban renewal and racial integration policies that were ostensibly supposed to improve these cities have utterly and ignominiously failed.
- ikarous 15y ago
  "What makes this ruin porn all the more infuriating -- and disturbing -- is that it started when the cool people with the right ideas from the Ivy League schools stepped in." Post hoc, ergo proper hoc? I don't necessarily disagree with you, but don't you think that there might be more contributing factors? In particular, the decline of the American auto industry comes to mind in regards to Detroit.
  - winestock 15y ago
    The American automobile industry didn't really get hit by imports until the Oil Shocks of the 1970s. By then, the productive population of Detroit was already fleeing to the suburbs. Also, if the decline of the American automobile industry explains the decline of Detroit, then the suburbs of Detroit would have declined as well, instead of expanding. Furthermore, the decline of the American automobile industry does not explain why similar declines occurred in the other cities which I mentioned.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

moheeb 15y ago

There is a great site called http://www.detroitblog.org http://www.detroitblog.org that goes through many of these buildings and, more recently, features the people that live in these areas. If you are more interested in the building porn I'd go back several years. The human interest stories are also mostly great and are more recent.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

klous 15y ago

I've lived in the Metro Detroit suburbs, and downtown Detroit is the spot right now. The ability to get whatever you need, yes even groceries, within walking distance is a reality. Walking to Tigers games, enjoying the nightlife, eating at amazing restaurants, and enjoying the city are a regular part of life. I live in downtown Detroit. I do not want to live in the suburbs.

pyre 15y ago
It is still sort of surreal that right next to the Tiger's stadium there are a bunch of condos, but right next to the condos are a bunch of overgrown/condemned buildings. Also, I've been at the waterfront for the freedom fireworks (combined July 1 and July 4 fireworks display) on the Windsor side of the river and it was a pleasant experience. I'd never consider doing the same on the Detroit side of the river. Though I should note that I haven't lived in the area since 2005, but most of my family still lives there. Edit: Here's what I'm talking about. There are rows of condos right by the intersection of I-75 and Woodward Ave, but to the north there are some empty fields with abandoned houses. At one point those lots (which are now empty) were lined with houses. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=&aq=&sll=42.337277,-83.053401&sspn=0.010167,0.023475&vpsrc=6&ie=UTF8&ll=42.344184,-83.051391&spn=0.005123,0.011737&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=42.344184,-83.051391&panoid=3xjdgQhpCSamXM4PdBz4Tw&cbp=12,335.84,,0,0.25 http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&#38... http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=&aq=&sll=42.337277,-83.053401&sspn=0.010167,0.023475&vpsrc=6&ie=UTF8&ll=42.342718,-83.05089&spn=0.005123,0.011737&t=h&z=17 http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&#38...
winestock 15y ago
And if you stay in the Green Zone, then Baghdad isn't all that bad, either. If you stick to the embassies, Addis Ababa is actually rather safe. Stay away from the favelas and Rio de Janeiro is a lovely place.
burgerbrain 15y ago
"The ability to get whatever you need, yes even groceries, within walking distance is a reality." No offence, but having lived in about 4 major US cities (Detroit not included), that seems to be setting the bar awfully low. Being able to buy groceries is just a basic necessity, and restaurants/nightlife is something every city has.

temphn 15y ago

At the end of World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. They were rebuilt into gleaming cities because they were inhabited by the Japanese. Today it's Detroit that looks like it was nuked. Except it was the inhabitants that nuked themselves, with quaint festivals like Devil's Night. No one has the courage to say what ruined Detroit, or Rhodesia, or South Africa. You have to pretend like it just happened. People get far more angry at those who state why it happened than they do at the drug dealers and criminals who've ruined the city.

tptacek 15y ago
Were Rhodesia and South Africa ruined by a sudden and deliberate demographic shift that decimated the region's tax base and created dysfunction in the regions politics, followed by three decades of setbacks for core economic engine for the region mixed with offshoring? Because I thought that's what did Detroit in. Not drug dealers. We have those in Chicago too, but also Boeing and stuff.
- winestock 15y ago
  That begs the question: What caused that sudden and deliberate demographic shift? What shifted in? What shifted out? Whatever caused millions of people to move out of their neighborhoods must have been intimidating.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Whatever force caused people to sic dogs on elderly women marching for the right to vote must be very powerful indeed, because it sure would take a lot to make me do something so horrible. Are you sure you want to chase this conversation down this path? I'm happy to just have us agree that economics are what fucked Detroit over.
    - winestock 15y ago
      Read The Slaughter of Cities by E. Michael Jones. I've referenced it a couple of times in this thread. The migration of blacks into Detroit and other major American cities isn't something that simply happened without a cause. That's the point behind the questions that I was asking in the thread to which you are responding. Jones' thesis is that the Brahmin WASPs of the Northeast feared a Catholic takeover of the United States through their high birthrates. They also didn't like the fact that ethnic-dominated unions could negotiate such high wages for their workers. They wanted to break up the cohesiveness of those ethnic neighborhoods and make the children go to secular public schools instead of Catholic schools. So, they influenced former sharecropper blacks to move north with the enticement of better jobs. The sudden population increase to cities that already suffered from post-WWII housing shortages did not bode well for good neighborly relations. Et cetera. Most of the serious commentary that I've read of this book denounces it as a conspiracy theory. Even asking the preliminary questions needed to flesh out the thesis results in name-calling. People see the conversation turn to race and lose it. Spell things out for them and they still lose it.

cosgroveb 15y ago

>> On more than one occasion, we would be approached by "youths" (one of them wasn't even that young) What does this even mean? I am seriously confused. "The smell of marijuana was another tell." Wow, the few times I tried weed in college everyone must have thought I was a drug dealer, too.

tptacek 15y ago
In fairness: if you're a white guy a predominantly African American lower-class neighborhood --- particularly Detroit --- and a group of young men smelling of weed are giving you the evil eye, they probably don't want to debate Wittgenstein with you.
winestock 15y ago
My brother has more experience in the business and has been in the area far more than me. He called them drug dealers. I trust his judgement on the matter. The smell of marijuana was, like I said, an added tell. EDIT: grammar
- gnosis 15y ago
  You don't have to be a dealer to smell of pot. It's also pretty hilarious to hear you being scared of kids because they "smell of marijuana". Of course, they probably did smoke pot. But this would earn them a big "so what?" from me, rather than a panicky exit. And if they were giving you "the evil eye", that would make me wonder if you did anything to deserve it. Were you sporting bald heads, combat boots, suspenders, and German memorabilia, by any chance? Or perhaps they'd overheard you talking to your brother about how all the black people had ruined Detroit.
  - winestock 15y ago
    How very droll of you. Maintaining foreclosed properties requires workers to take photographs of the property and secure the building, among other things; especially if the house has been broken into. By the time we get to a property in a high-crime area, the copper is often long gone. Broken glass isn't uncommon. The amount of destruction done to some of these houses is impressive. There are holes in walls and even holes in the floor. Toilets ripped out, shattered, and left to one side. I'm left there asking myself: Why go to all of this effort to destroy these things? What destructive impulse must some people have? It's one thing to argue about it in an Internet forum, it's something else to find it in many houses over the course of months.

dreww 15y ago

On more than one occasion, we would be approached by "youths" (one of them wasn't even that young) who were clearly drug dealers. One of my brothers confirmed this to me. The smell of marijuana smoke was another tell. pro tip for suburban residents: not all black people who smoke marijuana are drug dealers, despite what your brother 'confirms'.

fractallyte 15y ago
The word 'black' wasn't mentioned in the parent comment, which makes your reply rather jarring...
- dreww 15y ago
  it was obvious from that comment alone, and then became overwhelmingly obvious that that is why he was uncomfortable based on his other responses in the thread.