The ruins of Detroit

[opsec]

http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/index.html

Is it Detroit or is it Beirut, Lebanon? Hard to tell from these pictures.

[Dame]

Why are their homeless people anywhere near this place. 

[Atash Hagmahani]

I cant' reach the site. It's too slow. But I found a gallery of photos taken by the same photographer.

The question that pops up in my own mind is who's next after Detroit and New Orleans?! You've got cities on the east coast with essentially no industry left in post-industrial times, so you have to wonder what aside from government subsidies and maybe some traffic between healthier cities of the Bosnywash corridor keeps them alive.

I would guess too that there are some other cities left in the "Rust Belt" that have never found enough industry to replace what left.

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently —
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free —
Up domes — up spires — up kingly halls —
Up fanes — up Babylon-like walls —
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers —
Up many and many a marvelous shrine
Whose wreathéd friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in the air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye —
Not the gaily-jeweled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass —
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea —
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave — there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide —
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow —
The hours are breathing faint and low —
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

City in the Sea (originally "Doomed City")
Edgar Allan Poe
whose hometown of Baltimore is in pretty bad straits itself

[opsec]

http://www.marchandmeffre.com/

Atash, try this and click on Detroit.

[hancocs]

What a shame. This would really be heartbreaking to see first hand, let alone just the pictures. How very very sad.
May be a picture of more of this type of thing to come in our near future. 

[oldsoldier]

 Just wonder if this is a hint of things to come in the cities both large and not so large?  What news I watch anymore, seems that things are going to pot. Here where I live we are not a huge city probibilly around 75,000 maybe.  In the last couple of years,

  Whirlpool layoff's and final closing in june.................  4,000+ jobs gone.

  Indiana tube ( makes coils for above)...................... 750+ jobs will be gone

 Evansville blind association ( makes small parts for whirlpool).....100 jobs lost.

  Berry Plastics ( fridge liners.................................up to 1,500 jobs lost

  Walt's transportation and other transport local jobs......aprox. 600

 Local warehousing/storage/shipping.......................about 1,500 jobs.

 Local support,engineering, etc. including estimated loss of retail jobs.2,000 jobs.

This is with the loss of only ONE employer with the trickle down effect. There have been rumors that some other area companies are also completeing their moves to other countries or closing completely.

Local television manufacturer ( can not remember name) About 2,000 gone and another 1,000 soon to be.

 Eaton axle....... 3,000 jobs.

 Dana corp....... 1,200 jobs.

 Plus with the loss of Eaton and Dana in near by Henderson "trickle down" will cost another 2,500-3,000 jobs.

 What's happening? Fortunately for me. My job is safe and we seem to be getting busier. I drive a 18 wheeler for the local bakery, Lewis brothers is a very large regional bakery, making Bunny,roman meal, healthy choice,Indiana spud. And about 8 more brands. Since the economy has gotten worse people are staying home more,and apparently eating more sandwiches and such.

 I've heard that no matter how bad the economy gets people will still buy milk, bread, and coffee. Hope this and what's happening elsewhere is not a sign of___________.     

[Atash Hagmahani]

In other words, Oldsoldier, you've still got some industry left in your town.

The "post-industrial service economy" was not an accident. The think-tank people openly promoted it. Dr. Milton Friedman, who, contrary to his fictional reputation was no "free-market advocate", but on the contrary, one of the most gold-loathing "management society" central planners in US history, the man who invented the concept of wage withholding (and several other taxation policies he invented), openly advocated the wholesale offshoring of all our industrial capacity, and furthermore, hinted that the whole thing could be accomplished through an artificially over-valued currency.

What I have noticed is that those parts of the country that still have vestigial productive capacity fare the best in recessions. That's because, as you noticed, people still want to eat during recessions. On the other hand, the first businesses to lose all their customers (I was about to type "fail", but that's not necessarily true, since some businesses are bailed out regardless of customer demand or their own efficiency and success or lack thereof) are those that provide services that people can do for themselves, such as "day spas" and "doggy day care".

What you need to do to survive, is create a way to support yourself that doesn't rely too much on the outside economy. Now unfortunately you can not decouple-completely: you have to pay taxes in the national currency. Indeed, that is the primary purpose of having taxes and especially real-estate taxes, which are actually "rents". You can "thank" David Ricardo and Karl Marx for that little insight; it was their idea to use taxation as a means of preventing capital accumulation among the riff-raff, in order to establish and maintain a monopoly on capital. Another reason for having taxes is to distract attention away from seignorage (making money by charging interest on fractional reserves). If we didn't have taxes, the riff-raff would start wondering how government pays for its activities. In Hong Kong, where taxes are few and tax rates are low, they don't wonder; they enjoy the low tax rates and don't bother asking questions...

One particularly insidious form of "taxation" is inflation. Yet another reason for taxes is to create artificial demand for the national currency. If you didn't have to pay taxes, you could live fairly self-sufficient on your homestead, and if you just swapped a few goods and services with your buddies, you might not need ANY money, which is why the IRS considers that to be tax-evasion. In that case, you could opt-out of the national currency, and thereby avoid paying the inflation tax.

If opting out of the national currency were an option, then "the economy" would no longer be your concern. You could create an internal economy totally decoupled from the ravages of the external economy. "Inflation" and so-called "deflation" would not be issues for you; your fate would be dependent on your own productivity and efficiency, and not on what the rest of the economy is doing.

[darwinslair]

Went through the photos.  Incredible.

But have to say, what I see are a lot of THINGS which can be used for other things. Brick.  Smelted metals.  Concrete block.  Wire.

Heck, they show intact x-ray machines, homes built like castles (brick, solid, windows broken out) and many things that could be USED but have simply been abandoned.

Have to be honest.  With how much empty space there is there, if you dont need infrastructure, there is plenty of USABLE structure which when combined with empty space, would not make a bad foraging/scavenging environment.

Tom

[wander]

Researched several of the photos...
Michigan Central station (photo 2): closed in 1988 (22 years ago)
Farwell building (photo 4): abandoned 1984 (26 years ago)
Broderick Tower (photo 5): abandoned 1980's (20+ years ago)
Donovan building (photo 6): demolished in 2006, abandoned several decades ago
Whitney building (photo 7): abandoned in the early 80s
Fort Shelby Hotel (photo 9): abandoned in 1994, renovated and restored in 2008
Fort Wayne Hotel (photo 10): abandoned in the 90's
William Livingstone house (photo 11): torn down in 2007 (the photo is from 2004 or so, it continued to deteriorate quite a bit before it was demolished)
First Unitarian Church (photo 13): abandoned in 1982
The Packard Motors plant was abandoned in the 50's (several photos)

I could point out there are dozens and dozens of towns like this from the late 1800's up to the 50's throughout the western US, thanks to the gold rush. I think it's implied that Detroit recently fell apart, but it's been dying for decades. It just happens to be the largest city to die in the US. But historically it's inevitable when technology and resources change.

[opsec]

I didn't know this. I was wondering how such an advanced state of decay could have happened so quickly. Now the answer is obvious, it didn't.

[Atash Hagmahani]

Yes, it's been happening for decades, but it was not inevitable, and not the result of shifting technologies. The ghost towns of the old west were typically mining boom towns.

I visited one in Montana, that died rather abruptly when Congress revoked a federal program that guaranteed a fixed rate of exchange between gold and silver. Without that guarantee, the price of silver crashed, and so the impetus for having a town built near the top of a fairly high mountain (must have had severe winters!) ceased to exist.

With a larger town, the population itself is a resource; if unemployment rates are high, then that means that there is a lot of cheap labor that could be re-allocated to something else.

The reason this did not happen, was because the "rustbelt" was the victim of dire mistakes of policy from roughly the 1930s through the 1970s.

Look again at some of those fine old buildings. Detroit was once considered a city of some significant culture and prestige. My stepmother once considered moving there for a job, and she was an executive-level investment banker (not quite a Paulson but one step below that; quite high ranking). I thought the seeds of destruction were sown well before then and that it was a lost cause. Already the city had a shockingly high murder rate, and already had a tradition of rampant out-of-control arson on "devil's night" (Halloween).

The coup-de-grace probably came in the 1960s or 70s, when the autoworkers apparently won some retirement benefits that the automakers had no intention of fulfilling. In the 1980s they successfully lobbied for changes to the accounting methods for retirement plans, so that they could intentionally underfund the plans.

Never twist arms.

There were other problems too. For one thing, plans to "save" the city probably doomed it. If you want to fix a problem, create an economic incentive, such as a low-tax district, and then let the people do the job at the grass-roots. Top-down strategies involving big expensive projects such as the optimistically named "Renaissance Center" don't usually work. Much of the undoing of Detroit is, I think, is a microcosm of problems of the country as a whole.

I have a feeling that New Orleans and Detroit are the first to go of many cities, big and small, whose economic base is collapsing. Elsewhere someone mentioned upstate New York. I would also guess that a lot of the cities in the BosNYWash corridor lack any real purpose anymore.

It seems to me that California's continued death-spiral will eventually start killing off some cities there. It boggles my mind with tax rates as high as they are, and a state that is bankrupt, businesses aren't fleeing as fast as they can. Costs of doing business in California are high. They can't compete.

[opsec]

So what evolutionary course do you see this taking? In other words, what cities do you see holding out the longest as the rest of the nation goes to hell in a handbasket?

[offdalip]

Wash DC   that's where all our $$$ goes

[Atash Hagmahani]

Wash DC   that's where all our $$$ goes

I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but the man is right. According to my wife's cousin, who lives there, the real estate market there has recovered and is taking off again.

I often wonder if anomalous conditions in DC do not warp the federal government bureaucrats' view of things. Sort of like the crystal chandeliers in the Moscow subway during the Soviet days, while the rest of the country is in ruin.

[Mike]

So what evolutionary course do you see this taking? In other words, what cities do you see holding out the longest as the rest of the nation goes to hell in a handbasket?

I would look for low cost:
Low cost government
Low cost high value labor
Low cost high value housing
Low cost high value food
Low cost high value Heating/cooling
Low cost high value transportation

Detroit has low cost housing.  But.... expensive labor and government makes all else impossible.  And actually, the low cost housing is only a result of expensive labor & government failing.