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Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Imagining new life for Detroit

I saw a story yesterday at work about how the median sales price of homes in Detroit for the month of December was $7,500. Which made me think that Detroit may be dying a rapid death, but it surely won’t be long before some kind of new life takes shape there. Urban homeschoolers, for instance, might be drawn to buy a home there, because they don’t have to worry about schools and they tend to live frugally. They also have an outside-the-box mindset which might lead them to say, hey, it might be hard to find a decent job in Detroit, but you don’t need much income to make a house payment on a $7,500 house. You could make that much selling stuff on ebay. And I would have to think that garage sales, auctions and liquidation sales -- a prime source for ebay goods -- are rather plentiful in Detroit these days.
I could also imagine some Amish migrating up there. If they went as a group, they could buy several houses in a particular neighborhood and demolish some of them to grow crops on. (Except the Amish never really “demolish” anything -- they would reuse and recycle as many building materials as they could.) They don’t need infrastructure, so the possible deterioration of city services wouldn’t be a hassle for them. (Though they would need to figure out how to keep livestock inside the city limits.) When I mentioned this notion to a co-worker, he got a good laugh out of it. Imagine, he said -- the motor city being taken over by people who don’t drive.

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