Detroit After Fifty Years Of Uniterrupted Democrat Rule: 12, 00 Abandoned Houses

Here's a photo gallery of just 100 of them.

OS hopes you take a moment to view these. Some of them were architectural gems, the sort of house one would dream of owning in more innocent days.

If we're going to spend our energies foaming at the mouth about a Missouri GOP Senate candidate with foot-in-mouth disease, we should reserve just a bit of that outrage for the kind of governance that creates this sort of tragedy.

 Just a bit...

By the way, the heads-up to the world about this collection emanates from London's Daily Mail.

These shots of Detroit, and many others, look like London in the late 1940's. It's pitiful, it's tragic, and that tragedy is not lost on our English friends.

Yep, The Recession Is Over! Just Ignore The Neighborhoods of St. Louis Being Torched By Thieves

Nothing to see here, just move along, now.

Law enforcement officials, politicians and historic preservationists here have concluded that brick thieves are often to blame, deliberately torching buildings to quicken their harvest of St. Louis brick, prized by developers throughout the South for its distinctive character.

“The firemen come and hose them down and shoot all that mortar off with the high-pressure hose,” said Alderman Samuel Moore, whose predominantly black Fourth Ward has been hit particularly hard by brick thieves. When a thief goes to pick up the bricks after a fire, “They’re just laying there nice and clean.”

It is a crime that has increased with the recession. Where thieves in many cities harvest copper, aluminum and other materials from vacant buildings, brick rustling has emerged more recently as a sort of scrapper’s endgame, exploited once the rest of a building’s architectural elements have been exhausted. “Cleveland is suffering from this,” said Royce Yeater, Midwest director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “I’ve also heard of it happening in Detroit.”

DidYewJestHearWhutISaid??!!! The recession's over! Get yerself somewhar' else, now.

Nothin' worth seein' heah! Goh-won! GIT!!

The Tale of Detroit--A Cultural Post-Mortem

With news that Detroit's unemployment rate may now be nearing 50%,  I hope this will provide an opportunity for reflection.

Simply, how did this happen? If Detroit were a deceased party on the coroner's cold slab, what would the examination reveal?

What confluence of decisions taken and not taken on the ground in this city, combined with events outside of local control, created this debacle?

What was it about the culture of Detroit, the assumptions everyone lived with, that created such tragedy?

Time Magazine made an attempt of sorts in March of this year, with the unemployment rated listed at 13%.

Are we replicating those conditions in other parts of the country?  In our own neck of the woods? In our own businesses and families?

This is no time to gloat.  It is a time to ponder the past, the present, and the future.

It is time to look in the mirror, all of us, one person at a time, to learn from this tragedy.