patrick.net

So, uh, it's better to bulldoze housing than to let homeless people live in it for free?

Almost like the end of the gold rush mining days where towns died a slow death and where you can still get a home for around 20 or 30 grand since they never recovered but who wants to live there?
How will Detroit ever compete with 25 cent per hour Chinese labor manufacturing automobiles?

It is an obscene act to bulldoze housing.

People came up with all kinds of arguments that this was good/necessary/whatever last time we discussed this. You will not get me to agree.

So, cities will return the bulldozed neighborhoods to nature so that they can eventually sell the property to developers? We know that will happen.

I don't understand how bulldozing housing will change the unemployment rate, or the number of law enforcement personnel necessary. I do believe in bulldozing abandoned housing that's falling down and dangerous, but not the city purchasing these places and offering homes in more affluent areas to the owners. This plan is nuts.

This is another "cash for clunkers" idea. Lets get et rid of the potential inventory, to drive prices up and keep Americans in debt slavery.

Change?

On the other hand, the population of Flint shrank from 194,000 to 124,000 from 1970 to 2000. That leaves every 3rd house or so vacant. How are they supposed to pay for street mainenance, sewage, garbage pickup, etc.? They don't exactly have good Jobs either.

On the other hand, the population of Flint shrank from 194,000 to 124,000 from 1970 to 2000. That leaves every 3rd house or so vacant. How are they supposed to pay for street mainenance, sewage, garbage pickup, etc.? They don’t exactly have good Jobs either.

Good point. But I don't think that the city razing homes is the answer. I don't know what is.

>> This is another “cash for clunkers” idea

Yes, except they are not necessarily clunkers and we are not getting newer, greener houses in return.

All you must do to sell something is label it as Green. It's a crazy fad.

I don't know who here actually read the article, but here are a couple of points.
*The plan was the idea of Mr Kildee, treasurer of the county where Flint is. As treasurer, he no doubt came up with it as a way to cut their costs. It was not a plan by Obama to reduce housing supply and boost home prices.
*As for letting homeless live there, there simply are not enough people to fill those houses, homeless or not (at least in the Flint situation).

The federal government is looking to expand it to 50 cities, mostly in the rust belt.
It seems to me like a plan that could be implemented well in some cases.
Like you guys, I'm not in favor of razing good homes or razing any homes in an effort to cut down on supply. I could see how this idea could be adopted/misused for that purpose.

The article was pretty well lacking in details, but it doesn't seem like something to roundly condemn.

There is smart green and there is dumb "green".

Many of the same people that never understood real green are now getting bamboozled by dumb green.

Everyone that knows the difference need to speak up and educate the populus.

Bap say:
"nails pulled, straightened & boxed..."
(insert laughing emoticon here, that's funny!)

I love how some people didn't bother to read the article and just want something else to bitch at Obama about.

Suburbia is simply not maintainable. The kind of sprawl that it creates is just too expensive to support.

Before the automobile was invented, most cities were surrounded by fields, orchards, and forests. Today they're surrounded by cheap houses, strip malls, and miles upon miles of asphalt.

Cities like Flint have two options:

- Let the city rot and have everyone abandon it, leaving a blighted 35 square mile wasteland.
- Prune the city down to something maintainable, where population density is high enough to support businesses and infrastructure is efficient.

The city isn't going to 'come back'. The midwest as a whole will turn back to the farmland that it was before the industrial revolution. The only policies that you might possibly put in place that could 'save' the area are ones that would make American labor costs comparable to that of China -- which would mean a forced drop in living standards. Even then, those jobs still won't come back because most of them are being automated.

Planning and maintaining a city sometimes doesn't happen on a logical basis. I'll give three examples

1) in my town a donutshop moved out and another one moved in. Well this new one put in a drive thru...ok. Well you have the traffic that goes into the drive thru which when it exists can go left or right. HOWEVER there's also athe parking area and some people try to leave that way and do the same. Meanwhile there's a gas station next to it, a gas station across the street and a 711 next to the gas station across the street. Factoring in a red light and this can be a utter mess on the weekends easily.

2) A town near me has all these small shops and a small rotary (some call them roundabouts) well the trouble is this...you have lights that control traffic. State law mandates you have to stop for those on the crosswalk. So in driving in at a given point I have to look behind me for those that might enter, look to the right for another entry way, look ahead of me because traffic might have stopped due to the red light, look at the crosswalk because someone might be crossing, looking at the sides because that's where the parking spots are!

3) One town that has a bit of money never really planned traffic at all. There's a state route going though so they put ALL the businesses nearly right by it. Now many are smaller ones and might not have parking lots that large but here's the other problem. There's an industrial parks near by and resturants...guess what happens nearly every day around noon. Gridlock. We're talking outright ten minutes to move a mile gridlock. Is it that much to say "No I'm sorry it's nice but we can't afford the extra traffic putting something else in"

Bap33,

as good-natured parody, that works for me as well.

In my town there's a round-about with planters in the middle, and planters dividing the roads leading up to it. I called my city and told them that I couldn't see over the plants because my small car, when combined with the slope of the roads leading up to it, simply isn't high enough. I received a nice letter back from the planning department telling me that the plants are trimmed to a height that is sufficient for the intersection (18") and there is NO risk of an accident due to the plants.

About four months later there was a serious accident at that intersection, and the man who wrote me the letter was quoted as saying that there had been no complaints received about the height of the plants and the planters. The newspaper showed a photo of the plants at the time, and they were well above the 18" that the city said the specs were. The printed the name of the accident victim's attorney in the article, and I sent them the original letter that I had received from the City. I seriously received a nice thankyou note from the lawyer, and the City ended up settling the accident claim.

The problem with razing homes and suburban sprawl is that at some point someone will have to decide who moves where and it's not always fair. Also, if someone lives in a home that isn't maintained, what will happen if they're moved to a nice place and they don't maintain that?

Altho I disagree with Bap33 on many, many things, on this we see eye-to-eye.

Ellimae,

The height of the plants was probably designed/inspected by someone driving an SUV :-)

You know, the I-like-to-sit-high-up type, afflicted with the usual SUV smugness.

[I think it about time we start calling out and labeling the smugness of SUV drivers, since they seem to be trying to divert attention from themselves by calling Prius drivers smug.]

Nah, what actually happened was that they measured 18" from the roadbed on the high side of the road. There's a 2 foot drop on the other side. Dumb,dumb,dumb...

Kevin,

How about if a city de-incorporated some of the outlying areas, That would be a revolutionary concept. Or maybe a whole suburb could de-incorporated. Or maybe some "blighted" area in the middle (only kidding).

I'm not proposing this as a serious solution. There would be all kinds of problems in practice. But I think it could serve as a thought experiment that can be used to frame some of the discussion

justme:
Cities can incorporate areas whenever they want, regardless of the resident's wishes. Can they de-incorporate an area the same way?

elliemae:

I have no idea whether this is possible. I would think the affected region would have a vote on whether they would agree to secede.

There must be some level of standardization in city charters?

I would hope so. All I know is that I pay about $400/year less in taxes than the next town, and they have no better public services than my area.