Between three and four million households will be made homeless this year, is this figure on top of the number that has already been made homeless?

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000.

The exodus - particularly of young people - coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.

I'd guess that they've gone where there's work. Especially the young, especially the graduates.  I spent my teens in an industrially devastated city.  When we went to university, we knew we weren't coming back.

On the policy of bulldozing: Americans don't build their homes as durables in the same sense that Europeans do, many of their houses are built as cheap disposable items with a lifetime of 50 years, or so (see an example in Flint). Once upkeep of these houses is no longer being attended to, they quickly become cheaper to demolish and eventually reconstruct than to renovate.

I imagine that some people would like to live in nature, so I could imagine some more selective bulldozing. Although the reputation of cities like Flint might interfere with that cunning plan. Also, many older cities were settled on prime agricultural land, so you could try some organic farming outside of the industrial areas.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/06/low-interest-rates-lead-to-overbuilding.html#links

Nothing to add. Or maybe, yes, why are empty houses so expensive to the town councils... could it be an stupid taxation system?

It's hard to eat...

903.000 households were foreclosured on first quarter of 2009... Someone keeps the account?

Bulldozing might be the most sustainable solution in the long term, but who pays it?

Who caused it?

Who benefited from it?

Who shold be killed?

Finished.

Barack Hussein Obama--President of the United States, messiah to the world, the 'chosen' one to the Left, and the dreaded 'Fuhrer-in-chief' to many of us--stated that he wants to 'bulldoze' U.S. cities that are in a state of decline.

I have a suggestion for 'Dear Leader.'  Start by bulldozing D.C.--not the hallowed halls of government or our national monuments but the horrid, crime-ridden, drug-infested neighborhoods of the nation's capital where thousands neither affirm nor value liberty, the rule of law, or the U.S. Constitution.

For far too long the nation's taxpayers have subsidized this monstrosity in spite of the fact that it's inhabitants refuse to allow upright citizens to carry a gun and proceed to demand that they have a voting member of Congress, although they are not and never have been a 'state.'

So, if the 'President of the United States,' the One with all the answers that will 'save the world,' the epitome of deep intellectual contemplation and 'rational solutions,' wishes to bulldoze those cities that are a drag on the nation, what better place to start than D.C.?

Of course I would not expect Obama to even give such a thing a single thought.  And of course I am engaging in sarcasm aimed at such a notion.  But I hope you see the point.

Most U.S. cities that are in a state of decline are in the states of the central and northern East Coast and the central Midwest in the 'rust belt.'  These areas have been hit hard by recession and the failure of U.S. industry to stand firm against unreasonable demands of labor unions that have basically rendered them uncompetitive with foreign corporations.  Great suffering has, indeed, ensued in these areas as a consequence of our collective errors in judgment over a very long period of time.

But The Examiner is present in a spectrum of political opinions in 90 cities across the USA.  In addition to the cited Columbia Conservative Examiner there is a Columbia Progressive Examiner which is featuring an article entitled "Local environmental advocates fight coal plant proposal."  Both these "Examiners" are in Columbia South Carolina.  This is the first time I have encountered it.  It is advertising for writers on its home page.  It appears to be an internet based do it yourself journalism vehicle.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Next we may have Obama's black bulldozers coming to a neighborhood near you.  No doubt Rush will soon pick up on this.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

GWB's HUD (The U.S. department for Housing and Urban Development) and the Housing Authority of New Orleans decided it was better to bulldoze 1000's of housing units, some of which had survived Camille as well as Katrina, and then to lease the land to private developers for 99 years.

http://www.cwsworkshop.org/katrinareader/node/542
http://www.cwsworkshop.org/katrinareader/node/560

The police had to keep protesters away from city council meetings with pepper spray and batons while council members voted 7:0 to go ahead with the demolition.  Many of these protesters were former residents and at least one of their lawyers was arrested.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/12/20/neworleans.protests/index.html

This appears to have been swallowed, digested and forgotten by the U.S. mainstream two years ago.  Post Katrina New Orleans provides the blue print of how to help developers at the expense of the low income and unemployed.

http://southernstudies.org/2008/03/half-new-orleans-poor-permanently.html

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

Too Poor to Make the News

Peg, who is 55 and lives in rural Missouri, had been working three part-time jobs to support her disabled daughter and two grandchildren, who had moved in with her. Then, last winter, she had a heart attack, missed work and fell behind in her mortgage payments. If I couldn't help, all four would have to move into the cramped apartment in Minneapolis already occupied by my nephew and his wife.

(...)

What are the stations between poverty and destitution? Like the Nouveau Poor, the already poor descend through a series of deprivations, though these are less likely to involve forgone vacations than missed meals and medications. The Times reported earlier this month that one-third of Americans can no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions.

There are other, less life-threatening, ways to try to make ends meet. The Associated Press has reported that more women from all social classes are resorting to stripping, although "gentlemen's clubs," too, have been hard-hit by the recession. The rural poor are turning increasingly to "food auctions," which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates.

And for those who like their meat fresh, there's the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wis., a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he's supplementing his diet by "shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked and grilled." In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver is doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.

The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space -- by doubling up or renting to couch-surfers. It's hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers, journalists or anyone else who might be remotely connected to the authorities. At the legal level, this includes Peg taking in her daughter and two grandchildren in a trailer with barely room for two, or my nephew and his wife preparing to squeeze all four of them into what is essentially a one-bedroom apartment. But stories of Dickensian living arrangements abound.

In Los Angeles, Prof. Peter Dreier, a housing policy expert at Occidental College, says that "people who've lost their jobs, or at least their second jobs, cope by doubling or tripling up in overcrowded apartments, or by paying 50 or 60 or even 70 percent of their incomes in rent."

To save money, more than 20 Michigan counties have decided to turn deteriorating paved roads back to gravel. Montcalm County estimates that repaving a road costs more than $100,000 a mile. Grinding the same mile of road up and turning it into gravel costs $10,000. At least 50 miles of road have been reverted to gravel in Michigan the past three years.

It's not uniform.  Detroit proper peaked at the 1950 Census at roughly 1.8m, and has fallen by about half since then.  However, the metro area continued to grow, and the Detroit metro area is today larger than it was in 1950.

Even in boom towns, a similar process took place.  Atlanta hit a peak in 1970 at a little south of 500k within the city limits, and dropped about 20% of it (to ~394k) by 1990.  In the last 20 years, though, the city proper has recovered and grown to 520k.  Meanwhile, over that 40-year period, the metro area grew from about 1.7m to about 5.6m.

Flint, on the other hand, simply collapsed.  It isn't big enough to be a Detroit, let alone a New York or DC, where eventually demographics, cultural preferences and economic power begin to shift people back to the cities, as they have in those two cases.  And with most of the population leaving Flint, there's no obvious road to recovery there.

Many cities are seeing that shift, though.  Even ones which are in rough shape, and here I'm, of course, thinking of good ol' Baltiless.  I knock Baltiless a lot, but it's now in the early stages of gentrifying.  But Baltiless has the advantage of being surrounded by wealthier areas, which guarantees some money will flow into it.  It's got the makings of a decent economic foundation (Johns Hopkins, U of Maryland, some good tourist traps, etc).  And it has the advantage of being dirt cheap compared with everything nearby.

Now, what becomes of the new abandoned people and places?  That's another question.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

James Lovelock:

"Our main task, should the earth continue to heat, is to adapt and learn how to survive," he said. "We're unlikely to become extinct by global heating, but we may be cut back to one billion people or less."

That's approximately a seventh the world's current population.