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Detroit going back to farmland
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
03/12/10 2:11 PM EST
In Joel Kotkin’s New Geography blog Richard Cristiano asks whether deconstruction is the fate of urban America. Case in point: Detroit, where Mayor Dave Bing’s Community Development Futures Task Force has presented its Neighborhood Revitalization Strategic Framework. As Cristiano writes:
Twelve years ago, British urban historian Sir Peter Hall wrote in “Cities in Civilization” that Detroit “has become an astonishing case of industrial dereliction; perhaps, before long, the first major industrial city in history to revert to farmland.” Hall may have been prescient. This week, Mayor David Bing released the “Neighborhood Revitalization Strategic Framework," a landmark document that suggests that vast sections of Detroit be razed and returned to farmland, open space and nature. The report suggests the first organized and orderly deconstruction of a major American city.
The report envisons replacing entire neighborhoods with “Naturescapes” (meadows), “Green Thoroughfares” and “Village Hubs” that require fewer city services. But, it will require hundreds of millions of federal aid to finance such a major transformation, money the federal government no longer has to give. . . .
In five years, will Detroit remain a cratered landscape of vacant buildings, broken promises, and smashed dreams? Or will a smaller, safer, more efficient city evolve out of its ruins? If deconstruction is successful in Detroit, it could serve as a model for many other governments as well, from City Hall to state capitols and all the way to the most bloated disaster of all, Washington, DC.
When my parents bought a house in northwest Detroit for $11,500 in 1948, there was a nearby farm which stretched from Pembroke (7 ½ Mile) to the northern city limit at 8 Mile. Now houses in Detroit are selling for an average of $13,000, and Detroit is moving back to farmland. When people ask me why I switched from liberalism to conservatism, my one-word answer is “Detroit.”
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