Google Earth Visits – Detroit
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I will admit that I have never been to Detroit, nor have I ever had any inkling too, but with all the recent press that Detroit has been getting with regards to the automobile industry, and the state of the housing economy there, I thought I would make a Google visit. As with most of my tours, I start with the downtown area. I immediately became intrigued with Detroit with the overall layout of downtown. All the major streets are broad parkways that are heavily landscaped, and all of these parkways pinwheel out from a central park. Very nice indeed, and a classic layout seen in many great cities. I also like the fact that the ballparks are oriented to the adjacent streets. The whole downtown area is very pedestrian friendly (at least from bird’s eye), and extraordinarily well laid out.
Of course, from the air, you also see the downside. There is a tremendous amount of surface parking lots, and a fair amount of empty space between buildings. This provides opportunity for infill, with a good structure already in place. This of course, ignores the current economic climate of Detroit.
Now one of the things that amazed me even more, was traveling less than a mile and a half outside of downtown, and there are blocks and blocks and blocks of vacant land…street are there, but few structures. I have to ask myself, what happened here? In most cities, you see very dense neighborhoods fairly close to the city core. And this isn’t unique to this one area of Detroit, cruising around, this goes on for miles.
But why? Is there environmental pollution? Were these neighborhoods intentionally torn down, was there some kind of great fire? If you go miles out from the city core, you can find all kinds of new home development going on (or at least there was). So why has the city core all but been abandoned?
With all the talk these days about sustainability and redevelopment, this is an area where redevelopment should be strongly encouraged, in and orderly fashion. Why is the development in the suburbs, eating up raw land and having to extend utilities, when there is all this land close in, with all the infrastructure in place to support new development? I realize I am taking a rather simplistic view of this, as there are all kinds of other factors such as crime rates, environmental concerns, economic concerns etc. But these kinds of issues have been overcome in other areas, so why not here? I think as a society, we need to take a hard look at our priorities, and take a harder look at sprawl and urban development.
If anybody has any insight as to what happened in these neighborhoods of Detroit, I would love to here them!
March 13th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
The de-industrialization of Detroit is a hot topic right now. I’ve seen some cool photo essays and videos about the land becoming wilderness again, with wildlife, small agriculture, horses, chickens. Here’s one: http://current.com/items/76380402/re_greening_detroit.htm)
Judging from the realtor.com listings for Detroit housing under $5000, I’d say many of those homes burned or were otherwise condemned. People didn’t move back into the urban areas because for a long time they were bad neighborhoods.
Plus half the population of the city has left in the past few decades.
That said, I’m surprised that you’re finding any newer suburban development at all. That’s interesting.
I recall reading once that one of the major mistakes Detroit made regarding urban areas was to create islands out of new development so that you could drive in and out of the new mall/stadium/highrise, without ever interacting with the older infrastructure.
March 17th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Timely post Terence. This just came up on CNN today: Investors Find Real Estate Gold in Detroit.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/17/rtr.detroit.opportunity/index.html
I thought the first comment had a zero missing from the $5000 quoted. Here is an excerpt from the article:
Browsing through the real estate ads in Detroit can be depressing. Property owners, whether they are individuals or banks, are doing anything they can to sell unwanted homes. With so much of the local economy tied to the struggling Big Three automakers, some owners inside the city limits have resorted to offering homes for as little as a dollar, many for $50. The average is about $7,000.
Burgess says there is a reason these homes are so cheap. Most listings are in economically depressed neighborhoods where people are trying to leave, not buy.
“I have seen tons of $50 houses,” Burgess says, “but the house needs $80,000 of worth of work, and you can’t get an appraisal above $8,000.”
He says the prices on those homes are so ridiculously low because owners just want to get rid of the tax burden and the liability of owning them. It costs more to tear down these homes than the property is worth, so it’s cheaper to give them away.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:23 am
I totally understand that Detroit had some (or a lot) of bad neighyborhoods, far more than most cities do, and this is what drove the neighborhoods to be abandoned. I also totally understand that the greater Detroit area, and indeed Michigan as a whole is undergoing some unprecedented economic turmoil that will take decades to overcome, if they ever do at all. But as they reinvent themselves, I think they should agressivly work on redeveloping these areas. There is such tremendous opportunity here for Detroit to remake itself into a beautiful and diverse city. The bones are there.
Now this is not to say that some of this wasn’t already happening. I did find some pockets of new development going on the general area. Of course, with the economic meltdown, those too have been abandoned. It shall be very interesting to see what will happen.
March 31st, 2009 at 10:38 am
Detroit’s hexagon pattern looks pretty cool from the air. That plan was developed after the city burned down in 1805, and is a bit nightmarish to navigate for those of us from the square states.
Regarding the decline of Detroit, from one of my planning history classes, modern Detroit is a victim of redlining, a consequence of the Federal Housing Act of 1934 (and many other factors since then). Redlining, in my opinion, killed a lot of cities and encouraged the suburbanization of this country. To oversimplify greatly, inner city neighborhoods (particularly black neighborhoods) were considered greater loan risks than (white) suburbs; therefore, loans were harder to get, causing property values to fall… residents who were able fled to the suburbs… retail businesses catering to residents (i.e. markets, cleaners, restaurants, etc.) followed the money to the suburbs as well… leaving sort of a weird de-militarized zone of trashed neighborhoods with no basic services or property tax base… These neighborhoods were further cut up (and/or destroyed) when freeways were built, as well. I suspect that the vacant lots you now see from the air are the remnants of burned out houses and businesses, which were leveled in the interest of public safety to prevent squatting and criminal activity. Redlining continued through the 1960’s, and appears to continue today despite laws against the practice.
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