Detroit is filled with cheap real estate and those $500.00 houses sound attractive to out-of-town real estate investors. This is what they are buying.
Detroit is like eastern Europe, only without the decaying Stalinist architecture. And like eastern Europe, Detroit residents are fleeing elsewhere.
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I hear a lot about how these things are priced for $1 or $500. My real question is what does the city of Detroit have them assessed at. I imagine if you could sell a house for $500 and assess it at the same level so the property taxes are almost nil, that you may get a few people to bite and begin to remake these neighborhoods. Then again, with all the rank corruption and crime I could be wrong.
How do you even fix something like that? Maybe make Detroit some kind of Tax-Free Enterprise Zone where businesses and individuals aren't subject to taxes for X number of years? As Dan points out above, I suspect something like that doesn't line enough pockets, so it would never happen.
We've become a nation of half measures anyways, so I don't know why I continually expect to see more solutions and fewer platitudes...
I kind of feel bad writing this, but why fix it? We didn't fix Virginia City in Nevada. This is just another ghost town. Top-down pressure to rebuild won't make people motivated once it has passed a certain tipping point. If people get it in their heads that Detroit holds opportunity, then we can start thinking about helping them.
The problem is that these houses have been completely stripped and have deteriorated past the point where renovation would be cost effective (assuming a market existed). So they're tear downs with the hope that one day it will make sense to build new.
The only rational, but politically impossible, solution is for the city to condemn and tear down the worst neighborhoods. Then convert land to open space/park land. That will raise the value of the surrounding property and hopefully make it attractive to suburbanites to come back in and gentrify the remaining areas.
If it works, the end result is a smaller, more compact city at the expense of the 'burbs.
But it will never happen. It costs too much, carries too much risk of failure, and politically can't be sustained.
Dan, that is my understanding as well. These are "one dollar" houses but they come with heavy tax liens.
There is no hope for Detroit. Taxes are stifling, educated workers have fled, entrepreneurs are long gone. The US auto industry has departed for other parts of the country and Mexico.
I think Detroit serves as a lesson for Houston. We don't have all our eggs in the oil basket, but we still rely too much on it. (I think I last read that half of our economy is based on energy.) What if there's a sudden breakthrough in energy production? It could happen. We'd be toast. It would be 80s Oil Bust II.
BTW, I saw this in nicer parts of Bridgeport, CT in the early 1990s. Neighborhoods with nice post-WWII ranch houses. Big 4-bedroom places that were once upscale. Whole neighborhoods looked like everyone just vanished a month or so before and the cast from Mad Max came through. Very, very eerie.
Might as well let Mother Nature have it back.
I have property in Detroit. Even though it really only serves as a storage locker for my travels. It kind of works out since it's close to the Canadian border, it's easy and cheap to get layovers or flights there and the property is so cheap. However in recent years they've raised taxes so I doubt I'll be using it for that anymore.
god help whoever actually lives there...
Thanks for sharing. I guess Detroit has great potential as a city since it has attracted many investors.
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