Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Detroit's Sparsely Populated Inner City Neighborhoods

The abandonment of inner city neighborhoods in Detroit occurred as people fled for suburban areas. Arson, crime and riots also took their toll on Detroit's inner city neighborhoods. Check out this Google Maps of a sparsely populated inner city neighborhood in Detroit.

5 comments:

  1. Yep all those and abandoned become dilapadated and razed.

    The neighborhood is only about 1.5 miles from downtown.

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  2. Aloha,
    I am from the Detroit area and know a lot about it. There are chain supermarkets in the city limits, but no where near enough for the population. As fas as I know, there is not one large home improvement store (Home Depot, Lowes), and only one first run movie theater. This is in a city of over 900,000. Probably about half the city area is emptied out neighborhoods where you can sometimes look down for blocks because all the houses are gone. It is truly sad. And what I think is most amazing is the number of Starbucks in the city. Five. I can count more than that within a mile of where I sit right now (U Street). Detroit is the biggest example of the emptying out of American cities. Slightly smaller examples are St. Louis, Buffalo, Cleveland, Baltimore. All of these cities have lost 40-55% of their population since 1950.

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  3. Another former Motown boy here.

    There was at least one year during the 90's when the city of Detroit received precisely zero construction permit applications.

    Detroit's fate is especially poignant when you recall that, within the memory of people still living, it was something like the Silicon Valley of its day -- the incubator for a new and glamorous technology.
    - sglover

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  4. Wendell Cox follows these things:

    http://www.demographia.com/db-det2000.htm

    Now less than half its' peak population.

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  5. Wow, that looks like one hell of a place to live. Probably a lot worse than say Harlem NY

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