Don't tell me shadow, uummmm, you bought the second one there, nothing a coat of paint wont fix , right.
It should double every seven years right ....
So lets do the math
2013=$1 2020=$2 2027=$4
And thanks for giving us a look into the future of western economies. reminds me of an old planet of the apes movie, where they eventually stumble across the ruins of New York city ,and where the statue of liberty is half burried in the ground and everything has been destroyed.
People who are attracted to the prospect of buying a house in Detroit for $100 are encouraged to actually go to Detroit and get a first hand grip on the situation before putting their money down. The fact is that real estate agents there report than 100% of the people who GO THERE to investigate property purchases decide not to purchase. Not EVEN for a hundred bucks. In Detroit it's not about property prices these moments as much as it's about whether a person should buy at any price. Because "any price" can be had.
That hundred dollar house, if you buy it, is going to cost you at least thousands, maybe tens of thousands of dollars each year for year and years and probably a generation or more before things start to improve in Detroit, if they ever do improve. The Detroit City Council has come up with all sorts of terrific fines for "home-owners". Someone dumps garbage on your property, and yes, it really does happen, and you get a $500 fine. Someone dumps garbage on your property 10 times in fortnight and yes, you will get a fine for each time. The house you buy will have been completely stripped of all fittings and fixtures, and pipes and pretty much anything that can be used. If the house if empty for more than a few weeks, then the council requires you to board up all of the windows on the ground floor. Well, those boards get stolen, and the next day you get hit with a fine (it might be $400) for the missing boards and the council replaces the boards without your permission for a fee of around $500. Then the guys in the neighbourhood come and pick up those nice new boards and off you go again.
The problem with Detroit is that it is not a community. It is not a place to live. It's like the jungle. Survival of the fittest. Very much like living in parts of Africa in my experience. The number one real estate rule is to always have three people present when you enter a house, and to have your gun drawn. Because you don't enter an empty house for a viewing in Detroit WITHOUT a gun. Whatever you do to stay within the law today will have been undone by tomorrow. Bands of roving criminals and thugs own the city. It's very much like the vision Australian politicians have for Australia.
My suggestion is do not waste your hundred bucks on a house in Detroit. In a year you will be able to buy a nice apartment in some far better places for under $10,000 if you can't already. Like Las Vegas or Phoenix, where there is still law and order. All you will ever get from Detroit, apart from stress and heartburn and never-ending fines to pay, is a lesson in just how close humanity is at any given time to being a LESS civilised societal structure than you would find anywhere in the animal kingdom.
Lots of the houses for sale in Detroit are in areas where the real estate agent will tell you cannot go and see the house at all if you value your life. The streets are far far too dangerous. It's not much different to movies like 28 Days Later and I Am Legend, except the "zombies" have AK47s and even if they're not aiming at you, they are randomly shooting them pretty much constantly. From a safety perspective you'd be in a better boat buying property in the middle of the Congo guerrilla war. Carrying a gun when you inspect a house in Detroit is only for the good areas.
What's really hilarious, and which I saw when I attended one of Garth Turner's evening seminars, was two photos of houses for sale that he showed. The houses were 10 miles away from each other and were damned near identical. One was $25 and the other one was $600,000. Guess which one was in Detroit and which one was in Canada.
A while ago I was tossing around the idea of buying/speculating on land only in a depressed area of the US. No rent to collect, no damage to property etc. Of course their is no yield (and there would be holding costs) but what are peoples thoughts on doing something like that?
APF - a place where serious people don't take themselves too seriously. There's nothing else like it.
A while ago I was tossing around the idea of buying/speculating on land only in a depressed area of the US. No rent to collect, no damage to property etc. Of course their is no yield (and there would be holding costs) but what are peoples thoughts on doing something like that?
I can see direct links between the plight of Motown and the state of the US economy. When Detroit was a thriving manufacturing hub the USA was economically strong. As the amount of GDP the manufacturing industry contributed to the US economy dropped, so in parallel did the US economy. Why has Germany been so strong economically even after being destroyed by two wars? Their manufacturing industries have helped rebuild their nation. And what has Australia been doing to its manufacturing industry? Slowly killing it.
I'd hesitate to draw too many parallels. A lot of that manufacturing just moved elsewhere in the US. They still make more vehicles in the US than they made during Detroit's heyday. Detroit has been on a downward slide for more than 30 years, through good times and bad.
Also, this is a symptom of some fairly problematic issues with local government funding in the US. Everyone moved out of Detroit into the surrounding areas and they lost their tax base.
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. --Gloria Steinem AREPS™
Suggested to a bloke that Detroit just might do alright offering Asian/Indian migrants houses at their present costs - Like bring in half a mill Indian families and swap them a house for the missus' gold baubles - No idea HOW they'd do it but it's probably not too big a stretch to think it would help? Nah he reckoned - Detroit's population is 82% African American. And Indians (plus Asians generally) don't just naturally gravitate towards living in black communities - So there could be a bit of a shortage of takers ... Never mind; Seemed like a good idea at the time ...
A Professional Demographer to an amateur demographer:"negative natural increase will never outweigh the positive net migration"
The decision by Detroit, the cradle of the US car making industry and once the nation's fourth most populous city, to file for bankruptcy is the largest of its kind in the country's history.
Such bankruptcies are rare - only slightly more than 60 cities, towns, villages and counties have filed under Chapter 9, the court proceeding used by municipalities, since the mid-1950s.
Not everyone agrees on how much Detroit owes, but Kevyn Orr, the emergency manager who was appointed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to resolve the city's financial problems, has said the debt is likely to be $US18 billion ($19.6 billion) and perhaps as much as $US20 billion.
That dwarfs the case of Jefferson County, Alabama, which filed in 2011 with about $US4 billion in debt. The population of Detroit is more than twice that of Stockton, California, which filed for bankruptcy last year and had been the nation's most populous city to do so.
Other major cities, including New York and Cleveland in the 1970s and Philadelphia two decades later, have teetered near the edge of financial ruin but ultimately found solutions. Detroit's struggle, experts say, is particularly dire because it is not limited to a single event or one failed deal, like the troubled sewer system largely responsible for Jefferson County's downfall.
Instead, many factors have brought Detroit to this point, including a shrinking tax base that still had a 360-square-kilometre city to maintain; overwhelming health-care and pension costs; and city services crippled by aged computer systems, poor record-keeping and widespread dysfunction.
''It's not enough to say, let's reduce debt,'' said James Spiotto, an expert in municipal bankruptcy at the law firm of Chapman and Cutler in Chicago. ''At the end of the day, you need a real recovery plan. Otherwise you're just going to repeat the whole thing over again.''
Founded more than 300 years ago, the city expanded at a stunning rate in the first half of the 20th century with the arrival of the car industry, and then shrank in recent decades at a similarly remarkable pace. A city of 1.8 million in 1950, it is now home to 700,000 people, as well as to tens of thousands of abandoned buildings and vacant blocks.
People have to wait an average of 58 minutes for the police to respond to their calls, compared with an average of 11 minutes nationwide.
Last year, Detroit had the highest rate of violent crime in the nation for a city larger than 200,000, a report from Mr Orr's office showed. About 40 per cent of the city's street lights do not work. More than half of Detroit's parks have closed since 2008.
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