The sad state of Detroit: outlook falls with home prices

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-detroit-housingjan29,0,5435392.story

by dcurtis • 17 years ago

37 30 17 years ago

chicagotribune.com

RWilson• 17 years ago

Lower your burn, move to Detroit and buy a house for 2-3 months SF rent.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

Problem is, the houses are that cheap for good reason.

wallflower• 17 years ago

""It can be dangerous and it's definitely exciting," said McIlvaine, who had served as a sergeant in U.S. Air Force and started his retail career in security. "Your adrenaline is flowing as you are checking the house. You don't know what to expect."

Once the home is vacated and the locks are changed, McIlvaine can spend thousands of dollars cleaning it up. He leaves it to the sheriff to dispose of what's deemed the homeowner's personal property, while hiring contractors to haul out the trash. He never ever opens the refrigerator, a lesson he learned the hard way after looking in a freezer filled with rotten fish."

http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/mcilvaine/?post...

patio11• 17 years ago

Supply for them exceeds demand. That would depress the price of flawless diamonds.

Here's an anecdote for you: in Nagoya, you can pay $700 a month for a one-room apartment. Not an awesomely located fully-furnished palatial one room apartment, just your generic twenty-something sleeping quarters which is about the size of many Americans' closet.

In my town, I pay $450 a month for a three-room apartment. It was so clean when I moved in that I suspected they had put artificial sparkle on the walls.

The whole of the reason it is cheap and Nagoya is not is that my town, sort of like Detroit, has some systemic economic issues which discourage young people from living there. Accordingly, after graduation they move to Nagoya to work, pushing the price of real estate there even higher and making landlords in my town even more desperate to offload inventory.

blackguardx• 17 years ago

I thought a lot of those sales came with stipulations that the house be fixed up in a certain amount of time. If not, it is a pretty good price. You would think that the materials cost more than that.

jerf• 17 years ago

Expect the valuable materials to be gone. For example, http://www.michronicleonline.com/articlelive/articles/2440/1... .

rajat• 17 years ago

Yeah, but then you're stuck with the property taxes until you can find another buyer.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

Well, that made for some surreal reading.

There is no major grocery chain in the city, and only two movie theaters

I grew up in a town of 2000 people and we had 2 chain grocery stores. I'm guessing a walmart would be robbed blind, especially with an explicit corporate no-kill policy.

ojbyrne3• 17 years ago

The theater part seems to be overdramatized: http://www.google.ca/movies?hl=en&near=detroit&dq=de...

dcurtis• 17 years ago

There are two in Detroit. Warren, MI, where the next closest theater is, is half an hour away.

mrdod• 17 years ago

I bet they wouldn't let a Wal-Mart in Detroit. See Chicago.

jacoblyles• 17 years ago

If it weren't for the immobility of building capital, Detroit would probably no longer exist. As is, it exists only because of the low level of demand for its buildings makes it the kind of place that the poor and desperate can afford to live, which further lowers the level of demand for its buildings.

mojonixon• 17 years ago

Not even the homeless are moving into the city. The poor and desperate can't afford to leave. Sell your grandfather's house for 10k and go where? Once houses really become worthless, even more people will begin to walk away.

showerst• 17 years ago

Having experienced East St. Louis (and most of North St. Louis), reading about places like Detroit and Buffalo, I start to wonder, at one point do we just decide to 'give up' on a city?

Are there modern cases of abandonment of a major metropolitan area? (I don't mean losing 50+% of population, or large-scale migration to the suburbs like STL, I mean actual wholesale abandonment of a city).

It seems that with hundreds of thousands of people, Detroit and NOLA are still going to survive for quite a while, but at what point do we just declare a city below critical-mass for survival and start working on transitioning people out?

At some point it has to cost far more to provide fire and other basic service coverage to these heavily-built but sparsely inhabited areas than they could ever hope to return in revenue. Cities regularly clear out large areas for urban rehab or sports stadiums, would it be plausible (if even ethical) to just buy out 50,000 people and ask them to leave?

teuobk• 17 years ago

There have been a few that have been abandoned for environmental reasons. Prypiat, Ukraine comes to mind as one example. In that case, all 50,000 residents were forced to quickly abandon the city due to the nearby Chernobyl accident.

tlb• 17 years ago

It's hard to imagine anything on that scale. Centralia PA (former pop. 2600) was deserted due to major underground fires. But real cities have bounced back from far larger disasters. Hiroshima lost 2/3 of its population but recovered in 10 years.

Remember, though, the actual city of Detroit is only 1/5 of the population of the metro area. While Detroit is failing, the metro area is only hurting. It won't be abandoned.

dantheman• 17 years ago

Note: The fires at Centralia will be burning for 100 years -- they cause sink holes and other dangers.

tricky• 17 years ago

I'm not so sure giving up on a city would work so well unless you leveled it, ripped out the entire infrastructure and planted a lot of flowers.

At any rate, abandoning and ripping down historic architecture and craftsmanship is a terrible waste. Especially if you're just going to replace it with cardboard buildings and fancy facades. I think we'd be better off throwing the money at a group of un-corruptible, "really smart" people. There is a real opportunity to experiment with urban planning, development, and social programs to see if there is any way to turn it around.

If I had my way, I'd just build a wall around the city and turn it into a prison. Imagine how much wealth you could create making reality tv shows "from within the wall."

anamax2• 17 years ago

> I think we'd be better off throwing the money at a group of un-corruptible, "really smart" people. There is a real opportunity to experiment with urban planning, development, and social programs to see if there is any way to turn it around.

If 'throwing the money at a group of un-corruptible, "really smart" people' was an actual option, would Detroit be in the state that it's in?

> There is a real opportunity to experiment with urban planning, development, and social programs to see if there is any way to turn it around.

How do you think Detroit got to be the way that it is?

albertcardona• 17 years ago

Since when the solution to all problems is a government bailout? A bailout is the kind of "temporary" measure that Ayn Rand mocked so heavily in her now famous book.

The sad state of Detroit: outlook falls with home prices

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