Posted: July 5, 2009 at 9:56 pm | Tags: Business, Car, cars, church, communism, Crime, Danger, Detroit, Faygo, glass, house, Housing, Mt. Elliott, Palmer, Pictures, Random, trash, Truck, work
Welcome to Mt. Palmer
NeighborhoodScout.com is a fantastic resource for people looking to move. It as all kinds of fun stats on where want to live, how far your “neighborhood” goes, crime rates, school information, etc. No doubt it saves a Realtor a ton of time every year as they work to convince people to buy homes all over the country. Of course with this data, you can see where the safest and most dangerous neighborhoods are in the country.
Walletpop.com did a story recently analyzing the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the nation. Only one Detroit hood made the list, coming in at #23: The Mount Elliott / Palmer neighborhood. Within this small scope of streets there are a little over 150 projected violent crimes every year (or one every 2-3 days), the violent crime rate per thousand is almost 100, and the odds of you becoming a victim of such a crime if you live there is 11%, which is quite a bit by most standards (even the most dangerous neigborhood in America has odds of 25%).
The thing that makes the Mt. Palmer neighborhood interesting is that it’s a mix of residential dilapidation and an industrial wasteland: the neighborhood houses the Motor City Industrial Park, a massive complex that was once home to Packard Motors and now sits abandoned, with no clear owner, and is set on fire seemingly every couple of weeks now. As a Realtor, the only convincing point I could make to sell a home here is the price. There is nothing else that is even remotely inviting.
Mt. Palmer is located on the east side of the city, between Gratiot Avenue and I-94 to the east and west, as well as East Grand Blvd. and Mount Elliott to the north and south. You can view a map over at the Neighborhood Scout Website. It’s common knowledge that the east side of the city is more problematic than the west side, however while the residential parts don’t appear as bad on the outside, it looks as though this really is the place where anything can happen.
Here come the pictures. The sepia tone gives it a nice eerie feeling to it all, but of course you can see the full roll of pictures in full color over in the photos section. Click on any photo to view a larger resolution.
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Posted: June 22, 2009 at 8:49 pm | Tags: children, cigarettes, communism, Crime, Danger, Government, Hookah, HR 1256, Job, lil wayne, Markets, marlboro, Obama, osama, Pictures, socialism, tobacco
Just what we need: More government control over another aspect of our lives. As a former smoker (still a hookah smoker), I can tell you up front that this bill is a complete joke and abuse of power.
How you ask? Well lets just look at the “findings” by congress right from the bill itself.
1) The use of tobacco products by the Nation’s children is a pediatric disease of considerable proportions that results in new generations of tobacco-dependent children and adults.
That’s all well and good. However Childhood Obesity (up to 33% of kids) is much more rampant than the number of high school seniors that smoke (up to 24%). Not to mention that studies are showing that teens are smoking at substantially lesser rates than in years past, and this figure continues to fall yearly. Other problems facing kids, such as childhood obesity, all the nonsense on the television and in the media, and the glorification of anti-culture culture is on the rise, and much more dangerous.
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Posted: May 30, 2009 at 10:59 am | Tags: Crime, Detroit, Police, Urban Decay
Urban Decay: The final frontier
For the past 50 years or so, the city of Detroit has gained it’s infamy and reputation as one of the most dangerous places on the planet. While in the 1950s we still viewed far-off lands, ripe with savagery and untouched by modern man, to be the last places to be made civilized. Yet in many places, we find ourselves having to recover from taking a few steps back. With things getting worse faster than they are getting better, you can’t help but wonder if we are even recovering at all, or regressively falling back into the ways of life we worked for thousands of years to pull ourselves out of.
Bar fights, prostitution, hard liquor, gunslingers, robbers, roving gangs, and utter lawlessness sound like the taglines from a John Wayne movie about the old west. A time when you made your own rules and lived by them accordingly. But today, the same scenario can be described to represent Detroit. The once proud city has turned into an “each man for himself” ecosystem riddled with every kind of crime imagineable.
When you go to Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, or Miami, the city itself is an event. It doesn’t matter if there’s a game or festival going on, the lure of the hustle and bustle will suffice the average American’s thirst for adventure. You get adventure in Detroit as well, just a different kind.
The urban decay is rampant and apparent everywhere you look. While foreclosed homes are now commonplace all over the country, homes and industrial buildings that are literally falling apart are quite another site. In most of the western world these places would be demolished and the land used for new developments, in Detroit nobody wants to put the money fourth to take over land and develop it when little opportunity. It’s not uncommon to see a house completely caved in from abandonment and neglect next to a 2-story victorian home to a family of five.
You don’t realize how bad it is until you see it’s worse than a bombed Iraqi Palace.
Saddam's Palace, post bombing
A charming home on the east-side.
Such abandonment leaves property open to squatters, vandals, and thieves. Many derelect buildings sport spray-painted signs saying “NO COPPER” as all the copper and other metals have been stripped and sold for scrap. Abandoned warehouses and industrial complexes become storing facilities for stolen cars, merchandise, or places of residence for the homeless. The word “gasm” is written all over the east side of the city, and it seems to be popping up more and more each day. The city is, at best, a canvas for drug messages and urban artwork.
Ever had a powerful fudgasm?
With all this, you’d think the crime would be through the roof and we would have the police transformed into urban SWAT, but that’s nowhere near the case. In addition to the “new” territory to discover, city jails are full of vacancies, despite real crime continuing to skyrocket. Why? It’s simple: nobody cares.
With all the problems in the city involving homicide, sex crimes, and others, even grand theft auto means you’re most likely to be screwed and get little help, if any from the police. The police just don’t care. If they spend their time trying to chase down every stolen vehicle, that would be all they’d do. Most likely the car would be firebombed or stripped, if it hasn’t been chopped and never recovered at all. Minimal crimes like burglery or someone snatching your purse while you pump gas aren’t even worth reporting. Nothing will get done, you’ll waste your time filling out paperwork and getting shit from the police department who know they will never catch your criminal, and as such aren’t even going to give you the time of day to help you file charges.
Realistically, you’ll be fine and safe. In all my years, the worst I’ve ever gotten are bums begging me for money. But others haven’t been so lucky, it won’t take much more than a small search on google to find Detroit horror stories of theft and assault. But this is the new frontier. And if you don’t play by your own rules, realize that the ones set by society can easily eat you alive.
Back in the old west, you never knew if the bank was about to get robbed or if some act of violence was going to erupt anywhere you looked. Yet people were unphased by it, they knew it was part of life and you have to be tough and act accordingly. The similarities are uncanny. The liquor store you’ve wandered into just may be the subject of a hold-up. Or an argument between crackheads outside the store could end up with someone getting the shit kicked out of them right before the shifting residents, passers-by, or Detroit’s Finest.
The right mindset is the difference. Don’t expect anyone from the government to help you. The police will do you no good and probably arrest you for leaving the scene of a crime if you try to report something aftr they fail to respond. The your own law, take matters into your own hands, play safe, and be ready to deal with the consequences of your actions if you overstep your boundaries.
Even with all the restoration and rebirth efforts, drugs, alcohol, and violence run the show. Long-time mayor Coleman Young once said that there wasn’t a single problem in Detroit that couldn’t be solved by giving every one who lived there a job. It looks like we’ve hit the point where that is no longer true.
Welcome to the Wild Wild West.
