What can Las Vegas learn from the Rust Belt? Quite a bit, according to this article in the Las Vegas Sun.
Not to toot our own horn, but this story references Rust Wire, and our own Angie Schmitt!
I thought this story was well-written, and made an interesting comparison: though many wouldn’t think of it this way, Las Vegas and Detroit are both one-industry towns – Vegas’ industry of course, being tourism.
The author definitely did his homework- and talked to a number of knowledgeable folks in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Boston and elsewhere.
I …

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this Wall Street Journal article that traces the story of one home in the Motor City – and through that house, decades of history and change in the neighborhood and the city overall.
Spend a few minutes reading about 1626 W. Boston Boulevard, in Detroit’s Boston-Edison neighborhood, from its auto-industry origins to a subprime borrower.
-KG
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In this video, Detroit residents rally to save their neighbor from foreclosure.
“The crime wave that is going on in this neighborhood is a crime wave by the banks that are evicting people unfairly instead of modifying their mortgages and doing everything they can to make sure they stay in their homes,” one neighbor says.
I wanted to note that the particular bank involved is Wells Fargo, one of the leading villains of the foreclosure crisis. In Cleveland this $25-million bailout recipient refuses to appear in court for code violations on its …

Vice Magazine is carrying a very interesting article about the way Detroit is being portrayed by the media in the midst of its economic catastrophe.

“Detroit is being descended on by a plague of reporters,” says writer Thomas Morton. “If you live on a block near one of the city’s tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, you can’t toss a chunk of Fordite without hitting some schmuck with a camera worth more than your house.”

Accompanying the article is this photo, meant to illustrate photographers’ habit of literally cropping out prosperity from their shots.

We’ve written before on this blog that we were encouraged by Time Magazine’s declaration that it intended to devote resources to covering what is happening in Detroit.
Writes Time publisher John Huey,
“we believe that Detroit right now is a great American story. No city has had more influence on the country’s economic and social evolution. Detroit was the birthplace of both the industrial age and the nation’s middle class, and the city’s rise and fall — and struggle to rise again — are a window into the challenges facing all of …

I know we’ve had a lot on this blog about the current recession and how hard it has hit the auto industry and Michigan.
So, I apologize if you’re sick of reading about it, but I’m posting a link to this sobering Wall Street Journal Story about laid-off white collar workers.
“Mr. Barr, 46 years old, was the type of well-educated, white-collar ‘knowledge’ worker that Michigan hoped would help offset a decline in auto-assembly jobs. But Detroit’s Big Three car makers have aggressively thinned these ranks in the past two years, perhaps …

Detroiter and Great Lakes Urban Exchange (GLUE) leader Sarah Szurpicki has an interesting blog post this week, highlighting the Dequindre Cut, a walking/ biking path in Detroit.
Sarah interviewed Tom Woiwode, the Director of the GreenWays Initiative of the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan.
She writes, “Tom emphasized that, to him, bike lanes are important–but not in and of themselves, so much as potential triggers to a culture change.  The “greenways” are about inspiring “green WAYS” of living. They are also about the development of a community asset that Detroiters can be proud of and …

In honor of his 100th day in office, NPR ran a story yesterday on Detroit Mayor Dave Bing.
The former NBA star is contesting with a $275 million deficit, a potential municipal strike, school and transportation systems that are tetering on collapse.

According to NPR some are questioning whether Bing, a political novice who replaced Kwame Kilpatrick, is up to the job.
Bing won a recent primary with 70 percent of the vote. But his opponent Tom Barrow, a C.P.A., says Bing is in over his head.
“He just doesn’t understand how municipal finance …

A study by a University of Michigan researcher has confirmed what we already knew: City residents pay more taxes.

“Workers in expensive cities in the Northeast, Great Lakes and Pacific regions bear a disproportionate share of the federal tax burden, effectively paying 27 percent more in federal income taxes than workers with similar skills in a small city or rural area,” according to The Atlantic.

The study asserts that city residents have higher incomes than their rural counterparts, but also contend with higher cost of living. This holds for not only pricey cities like L.A. and New York, but also Detroit.

These feral houses in Detroit – and they are truly feral (returning to nature)- not just abandoned were captured by photographer James Griffioen. We’ve featured his blog on Rust Wire before.
Take a look at some of his other images, especially the ones from the Detroit Public School Book Depository- amazing.
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