Over the weekend, another of Downtown Detroit’s landmark buildings was imploded.
The Ilich family has a long history in Detroit. Mike Ilich made his fortune from Little Caesar’s Pizza! Pizza! and owns the Detroit Tigers baseball team and the Redwings NHL Hockey team. He is taking the lead in saving Detroit by tearing it down. The family is also involved with the Casino business in Detroit.
The Park Avenue Hotel (just North of the supermarket icon) was imploded over the weekend. It was located in a desolate wasteland north of I-75. Cass Avenue runs parallel to Woodward Avenue but ends at New Center, the former location of GM’s world headquarters and the Fisher Tower, home of WJR-AM, the “Great Voice of the Great Lakes”. The Hotel was built during the Roaring 20s boom, but after WW2 fell into disrepair as it was too far from downtown and eventually cut off by the Freeway. Many have pointed out the irony of the decline of Detroit, the Motor City, was due to the rush to build freeways – splitting apart neighborhoods with impenetrable barriers. Detroit was shedding population long before the 1967 race riots.
The plan is to build a new modern venue for the Redwings, which currently use Joe Lewis Arena, built in 1979. Joe Lewis Arena will be demolished in 2017 if things go according to plan. The area will be replaced by high end condominiums and a new convention center. This aspect was one of the final details to conclude the Detroit bankruptcy plan.
Perhaps “the Joe Lewis fist” will also come down. It is viewed by many as an offensive symbol of the Black Nationalist movement. They lost the war in Detroit. Time to be adults, accept reality, let go and move on. Secession from the United States (“a Black Nation within a Nation”) is not an option for Black America. Moving it to a museum would be a big step toward healing Detroit.
Central planning is the problem, not the solution. Annual property tax on some properties in Detroit is higher than the property’s market value, and the central planners are surprised that there are buildings in disrepair and many abandoned. After destroying the place with these policies, what is their answer? Declare bankrupcy and rather than pay the creditors, spend the little tax money to line the pockets of the billionaire sports team owner with the expectation of campaign contributions.
Look at the alternative: Houston, Texas has no zoning laws and continues to prosper.
The biggest change in Charlotte is they have embraced the “city planning” model. I love the old part of the city where there is a tire repair store next to a restaurant, across the street from a feed mill. “New Charlotte” is one interchangeable cul de sac subdivision after another, visually and physically separated from the road, mega churches, businesses segregated to only a few large strip malls. The man responsible for most of this died a few days ago – his name was Allen Tate.
Go over the border into South Carolina and new construction is booming. Near the Lance cracker plant inside Charlotte, they tore down an entire neighborhood that I assume was worker housing for the plant. This is within walking distance of a light rail station. The land sits vacant as the city changed its mind. The elected mayor now sits in Federal Prison for trying to extort money from a “developer” who wanted to get permission to build along the LRV land. Whatever the original intentions, city planning ultimately becomes an extortion racket
100% agreed. Most central planners in the US want to keep people from living near jobs- zoning usually creates zones where jobs are prohibted and makes the population dependent on centrally planned transportation and centrally planned roads in order to survive.
The Central Planners in the Soviet Union did one thing right, they located homes and businesses near the electric power plants. Rather than dump their plant’s heat into the river to kill the fish, the heat was used to heat the homes and business they had built nearby.