Update on Detroit

While Uncle Ken  has been on hiatus, I have been doing a little research on Detroit. Much of this information came from the Wiki article "Decline of Detroit". Okay, I was mistaken about the riot of 1967 causing the decline of Detroit, but it certainly accelerated it.

Of the 1967 riots, politician Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor, wrote in 1994:

The heaviest casualty, however, was the city. Detroit's losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totally twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion—the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969.^[22]

Detroit's population peaked at over 1.8 million in 1950, and it was pretty much all downhill from there. The first emigrants went to the immediate suburbs, as part of the great urban sprawl movement of the 20th Century. Most of these people still commuted to their jobs in Detroit, until the jobs also started to leave the city in their perennial search for cheap labor.

By the 2010 census, Detroit had lost 60% of it's population. The good news is that we don't need to expel Detroit from the State of Michigan. At this rate, Detroit will be totally depopulated in another 40 years or so. The vacant land could be used to replace some of the agriculture and forestry property that has been lost to urban sprawl over the years. Indeed, much of the city has already been cleared of derelict buildings by city demolition crews, as well as amateur salvagers and arsonists. Some of it is being converted to farms and gardens, while the rest is spontaneously reverting to prairie and forest.

As may be seen in the above quote, the Detroit Riot of 1967 is often referred to in the plural. Detroit experienced two other riots in its history, one in 1867 and another in 1943, but that's not what people are talking about when they refer to "the riots". The late 1960s also saw riots in Pontiac, Flint, Saginaw, Grand Rapids, and Toledo. This whole region of Southern Michigan and Toledo, Ohio, which should also be in Michigan, is commonly referred to by Northerners as "Down Below". This area went to hell in the late 60s and hasn't recovered since. They even have a town named "Hell", which might be a good choice for their capital when they reorganize after we detach them from the real Michigan, which is also known as "God's Country".

Although there certainly is a racial component to the decline and fall of Detroit and other "Rust Belt" cities, it's not just about race anymore. In the last decade or so, Black people have also been leaving in droves, and you won't believe where they're going: The South! I have heard it described as the "New South" before, but I thought that was just Chamber of Commerce hype. Come to find out, the South has been undergoing a kind of renaissance while the North has been rusting away all these years. I hear they have jobs down there and everything. Of course they don't pay much, but nothing does anymore. I once met a guy who had just returned from working on an oil well in Oklahoma. When the well shut down and no other jobs were available, the guy came home. He said "I'd rather be poor in Cheboygan than poor in Oklahoma." I suppose the Southerners feel the same way about their homeland.