“Are you better off having a job and making 90% of what you’re at today or having no job at all? To me, you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to say I’ll take that 90%.”
– Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, addressing UAW.
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Remember when Detroit, MI was known as MOTOR CITY? Motown? The center of the world’s auto industry and popular black music? Not anymore. Today, Detroit looks more like a ghost town compared to its former glory. Some parts of Detroit looks like a Third World country with boarded up homes, large swaths of empty lots where homes and buildings used to be, and entire vacated neighborhoods. Old warehouses and production plants look like haunted skeletons of their former selves. Many communities have been reduced to grass fields. Detroit’s population has been reduced to over HALF of what it was over a decade ago.
And things are not looking up.
Mayor Dave Bing (yup, former NBA All-Star) has the toughest job in America. His job in a nutshell; take a city with a severe deficit and ZERO economic prospects and make very, very tough decisions. AND he has to fight against a powerful organized union, a union which is sucking the city coffers dry while maintaining its own selfish needs. He doesn’t even take a salary for this thankless task.
One of Mayor Bings plans is to demolish and deconstruct abandoned buildings. Deconstruction requires meticulously disassembling a building and salvaging the parts. Noble, yes. But is this economically prudent? Thats for the Motor City citizens to decide…
Posted: Sept. 19, 2010
Deconstructing Detroit: Instead of demolition, city is urged to recycle
BY NAOMI R. PATTON
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
It was big news this spring when Detroit Mayor Dave Bing announced that the city would demolish 3,000 vacant properties by the end of this year.
As of this month, officials say 1,575 city-owned properties have been either demolished or are under contract for demolition.
With far less fanfare, five city-owned abandoned houses in the Brightmoor neighborhood also came down this summer. They were not demolished, however, but rather deconstructed.
The houses have been taken apart — mostly by hand — by the Motor City Blight Busters with cooperation from the city. The plan is to salvage the materials to be reused, repurposed or recycled.
Read more: Deconstructing Detroit: Instead of demolition, city is urged to recycle | freep.com | Detroit Free Press http://www.freep.com/article/20100919/NEWS01/9190431/1320/Instead-of-demolition-Detroit-urged-to-recycle#ixzz0zzd527Rl
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Can Detroit Be Saved?
by Stephen Moore
Dec 19, 2009
Dave Bing has just signed on to four years of maybe the most futile and thankless job in America: mayor of Detroit. What in the world was he thinking?
“I wouldn’t have taken this job if this wasn’t doable,” he tells me. “I finished basketball in 1978, then went into my own business in 1980 and did it for 29 years. . . . Now I get to the end of that career and probably should have retired. But there was a calling greater than anything that I ever envisioned, and that was to help bring this city back.”
Yet Mr. Bing is a realist, something Detroit hasn’t had at the helm for a long time. “We’ve been paralyzed by a culture in the city of Detroit, and maybe the state of Michigan, of entitlement,” by which he means ever-rising union wages. “Our people, I don’t believe, truly understand how dire the situation is. There are ugly decisions that need to be made and I’m surely not going to be popular for making them. But I didn’t take this job based on popularity.”
Read More here – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703558004574581650636077732.html
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It’s ironic to talk about REAL recovery when many large corporations move their entry-level and middleman positions overseas.
The Off-Shored Economy: The Ruins of Detroit
by Paul Craig Roberts
March 20, 2010
In the 20th century, Detroit, Michigan, symbolized American industrial might. Today it symbolizes the offshored economy.Detroit’s population has declined by half. A quarter of the city–35 square miles–is desolate with only a few houses still standing on largely abandoned streets. If the local government can get the money from Washington, urban planners are going to shrink the city and establish rural areas or green zones where neighborhoods used to be.
The American economic and political leadership has used its power to serve its own interests at the expense of the American people and their economic prospects. By enriching themselves in the short-run, they have driven the U.S. economy into the ground. The U.S. is on a path to becoming a Third World economy.
Read More … http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18239
Suicide Nation 