Live data from Hacker News

Detroit in Ruins

detroiturbex.com

111–120 of 177 posts

Re: Detroit in Ruins

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That begs the question: What caused that sudden and deliberate demographic shift? What shifted in? What shifted out? Whatever caused millions of people to move out of their neighborhoods must have been intimidating.

Whatever force caused people to sic dogs on elderly women marching for the right to vote must be very powerful indeed, because it sure would take a lot to make me do something so horrible. Are you sure you want to chase this conversation down this path? I'm happy to just have us agree that economics are what fucked Detroit over.

Read The Slaughter of Cities by E. Michael Jones. I've referenced it a couple of times in this thread. The migration of blacks into Detroit and other major American cities isn't something that simply happened without a cause. That's the point behind the questions that I was asking in the thread to which you are responding.

Jones' thesis is that the Brahmin WASPs of the Northeast feared a Catholic takeover of the United States through their high birthrates. They also didn't like the fact that ethnic-dominated unions could negotiate such high wages for their workers. They wanted to break up the cohesiveness of those ethnic neighborhoods and make the children go to secular public schools instead of Catholic schools.

So, they influenced former sharecropper blacks to move north with the enticement of better jobs. The sudden population increase to cities that already suffered from post-WWII housing shortages did not bode well for good neighborly relations. Et cetera.

Most of the serious commentary that I've read of this book denounces it as a conspiracy theory. Even asking the preliminary questions needed to flesh out the thesis results in name-calling. People see the conversation turn to race and lose it. Spell things out for them and they still lose it.

Re: Detroit in Ruins

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That begs the question: What caused that sudden and deliberate demographic shift? What shifted in? What shifted out? Whatever caused millions of people to move out of their neighborhoods must have been intimidating.

Whatever force caused people to sic dogs on elderly women marching for the right to vote must be very powerful indeed, because it sure would take a lot to make me do something so horrible. Are you sure you want to chase this conversation down this path? I'm happy to just have us agree that economics are what fucked Detroit over.

Whites committed many racist atrocities to preserve white majority rule. Those who did are rightly condemned today.

However, do you believe it was legitimate for Nelson Mandela's wife and the ANC to engage in necklacing of those who opposed black majority rule in South Africa?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing

Or for Coleman Young to literally raze Poletown?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poletown http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922498,00.h...

Some believe it takes two hands to clap.

Re: Detroit in Ruins

#113

My brothers run a property service company that maintains foreclosed homes in Detroit and parts northwest of it. When they need extra help, I ride along with them. Detroit and Pontiac are not the kinds of places that one would care to go by oneself, even for muscular young men. On more than one occasion, we would be approached by "youths" (one of them wasn't even that young) who were clearly drug dealers. One of my b…

>> On more than one occasion, we would be approached by "youths" (one of them wasn't even that young) What does this even mean? I am seriously confused. "The smell of marijuana was another tell." Wow, the few times I tried weed in college everyone must have thought I was a drug dealer, too.

My brother has more experience in the business and has been in the area far more than me. He called them drug dealers. I trust his judgement on the matter.

The smell of marijuana was, like I said, an added tell.

EDIT: grammar

Re: Detroit in Ruins

#116
post #84

My brothers run a property service company that maintains foreclosed homes in Detroit and parts northwest of it. When they need extra help, I ride along with them. Detroit and Pontiac are not the kinds of places that one would care to go by oneself, even for muscular young men. On more than one occasion, we would be approached by "youths" (one of them wasn't even that young) who were clearly drug dealers. One of my b…

I've lived in the Metro Detroit suburbs, and downtown Detroit is the spot right now. The ability to get whatever you need, yes even groceries, within walking distance is a reality. Walking to Tigers games, enjoying the nightlife, eating at amazing restaurants, and enjoying the city are a regular part of life. I live in downtown Detroit. I do not want to live in the suburbs.

"The ability to get whatever you need, yes even groceries, within walking distance is a reality."

No offence, but having lived in about 4 major US cities (Detroit not included), that seems to be setting the bar awfully low. Being able to buy groceries is just a basic necessity, and restaurants/nightlife is something every city has.

Re: Detroit in Ruins

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key word is ethnicity. The book that changed my way of thinking about the subject is _The Slaughter of Cities_, by E. Michael Jones. http://www.amazon.com/Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Ethnic-Cleans... "In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to do with design or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the last gasp attempt of the WASP ruling class…

"The largely Catholic ethnics" (I'm a Catholic of Irish and Eastern European descent) were not "driven out" of their neighborhoods. They left them as a reaction to integration and the beginning of the end of redlining policies. The "control" they lost was "the ability not to live next to ethnic minorities other than their own". Moreover, upon leaving the white Irish Catholic and Polish enclaves, mortgage lending move…

Yes, they were driven out. There was a sharp increase in crime caused by the friction of disparate groups suddenly coming in close contact with each other (Devil's Night and so forth). Yugoslavia broke up due to such friction, and those ethnic groups have been in contact with each other for centuries. The Malays and Chinese of Malaysia have had plenty of scuffles, too, and they've been around each other for a long time, as well. Those are just two examples. Diversity + Proximity = War. A fortiori, integration in Detroit was going to be eventful.

Furthermore, a lot of people throughout the world like to live next to those who are like themselves. I mean, a lot. When I was younger, I was shocked by the attitudes of older members of my family towards out-groups. I'm a little older, now, and see that it's not going away. We need to build around this fact of human nature, because we can't plow it through.

If the remaining residents of Detroit were being "systematically denied ownership of their own homes" then some bank could make a killing giving them home loans. During the housing bubble, we saw what happened when banks did that. My brothers make a living picking up the pieces.

I'm not injecting race into anything because race was a part of this to begin with. Noam Chomsky, in his book Understanding Power, noted this: "Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic."

The blank slate hypothesis of human nature has a lot of evidence going against it. If natural selection is true, then different populations of any species must have different distributions of alleles. Otherwise, there's nothing for natural selection to select. Cochran & Harpending cover this: http://the10000yearexplosion.com/

As for E. Michael Jones, he didn't start going into his theory of the Jews until after he wrote his other work.

Re: Detroit in Ruins

#118
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "sudden and deliberate demographic shift", also known as white flight, may indeed have happened because whites were and are irrationally racist. This is certainly the conventional wisdom. And by the end, there was surely no dearth of white racists, especially among the Polish community after the confrontation with Coleman Young. But is it legitimate for people to state that there may be other factors as well, in…

No, it's not illegitimate to state that. Racism was a small factor. There was virulent racism in Chicago as well. The big reason is economics. The viewpoint that will (rightly) get you shunned is the one that says "black people" were a factor (or, worse, "an international Jewish conspiracy to take over American culture").

[deleted]

Re: Detroit in Ruins

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The largely Catholic ethnics" (I'm a Catholic of Irish and Eastern European descent) were not "driven out" of their neighborhoods. They left them as a reaction to integration and the beginning of the end of redlining policies. The "control" they lost was "the ability not to live next to ethnic minorities other than their own". Moreover, upon leaving the white Irish Catholic and Polish enclaves, mortgage lending move…

Yes, they were driven out. There was a sharp increase in crime caused by the friction of disparate groups suddenly coming in close contact with each other (Devil's Night and so forth). Yugoslavia broke up due to such friction, and those ethnic groups have been in contact with each other for centuries. The Malays and Chinese of Malaysia have had plenty of scuffles, too, and they've been around each other for a long ti…

I'm sufficiently creeped out now to let you have the last word. Jiminy.

Re: Detroit in Ruins

#120
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New York and Newark are nothing like Detroit right now. Both are going through a great revival. There are a lot of reasons why, but it really has nothing to do with machine politics, ivy league educated people, or anything else you mentioned. In my opinion, most of the credit goes to better policing, everything else follows the drop in crime.

I very nearly agree with you, but I'd argue that policing has little to do with it as well. Detroit's crime rate has plummeted since the 1970s along with the rest of the US, despite no widely-celebrated crackdown. [1] Indeed crime rates have continued their drop from even the early 2000s despite a police department that was rapidly shrinking and increasingly mired in corruption/abuse investigations over that same tim…

Perhaps they should take a look at how east German cities were and are coping with a shrinking population?
Post reply on HN