A midnight blue Chevy rolls slowly down a snow-covered street, an emergency strobe light on its roof and a sign on its side that promises this is “official business.” At each house, business, even vacant lot, workers in the car pause to decide whether someone lives there and what shape the place is in before snapping a photo and beaming it to “mission control” miles away.
All over Detroit, scores of these workers ”” on some days as many as 75 three-person teams ”” have been wending their way through the streets since December, cataloging on computer tablets one of this bankrupt city’s most devastating ailments: its tens of thousands of abandoned and dilapidated buildings.
Everyone here has long known that Detroit is plagued by emptying neighborhoods, but this expedited, top-to-bottom analysis of all 380,217 parcels of land in the city, which is to be finished in a matter of weeks, will quantify the state of blight here with a level of detail rare for an American city.
How convenient: a detailed catalog of the ruin caused by rampant out of control liberalism.
Liberalism indeed, but a lot of plain old corruption. The city has been looted by it’s political class, and left to rot.
It’s also fair to note how the falling fortunes of the automobile industry played a role, but they aren’t in the business of maintaining cities. My own town relied heavily on a military base and a couple of major suppliers of military hardware. That has been ramping back for 20 years or more. One plant went from 25,000 workers to 5,000. But the city government was able to draw businesses and blunt the effect of military cutbacks. It’s a function of having a functional community versus … Detroit.