Obama To Bulldoze US Cities
Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic “shrink to survive” proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.
The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.
Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.
The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.
Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.
Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.
Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.
In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.
“The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we’re all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way,” said Mr Kildee. “Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.”
Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was “both a cultural and political taboo” about admitting decline in America.
“Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They’re at the point where it’s better to start knocking a lot of buildings down,” she said.
Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.
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.
In the city centre, the once grand Durant Hotel – named after William Durant, GM’s founder – is a symbol of the city’s decline, said Mr Kildee. The large building has been empty since 1973, roughly when Flint’s decline began.
Regarded as a model city in the motor industry’s boom years, Flint may once again be emulated, though for very different reasons.
But Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that “big is good” and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles.
He said: “The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there’s an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they’re shrinking, they’re failing.”
But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said.
If the city didn’t downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added.
Flint’s recovery efforts have been helped by a new state law passed a few years ago which allowed local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply.
They could then knock them down or sell them on to owners who will occupy them. The city wants to specialise in health and education services, both areas which cannot easily be relocated abroad.
The local authority has restored the city’s attractive but formerly deserted centre but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas.
Mr Kildee estimated another 3,000 needed to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same.
Already, some streets peter out into woods or meadows, no trace remaining of the homes that once stood there.
Choosing which areas to knock down will be delicate but many of them were already obvious, he said.
The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee.
“Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow,” he said.
Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution “defeatist” but he insisted it was “no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again”.
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Maybe they could start with Oakland and then take the D-8’s up to Richmond for some urban renewal…
If we’re lucky they’ll have the blades down and scrape some of the dirty fucking hippies out of Berkeley on the way up the road.
Reminds me of Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Remember his Operation Remove Scum where he bulldozed most of the shanty towns around the capital of Harare because the sight of the peeons offended him & would ruin his birthday festivities?
Mugabe took the bread basket of Africa & turned it into the basket case of Africa. Looks like O is using the same approach to government as Mugabe.
While I am generally opposed to Pres. Obama’s agenda, this one concept is something… as a resident of a Detroit suburb… that I support.
http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2009/05/convergence-of-ideas-to-fix-detroit.html
I’m not sure that the Federal Government is required to do something that the cities and states can do by themselves, however.
Credit to Pres. Obama’s administration for stealing a good idea.
If you’re lucky,maybe the boy’s will make it to your “hood”.Diesel and dust,ohhhhh yeah….
So where do you go if you live in a shitty neighborhood and your house is not a piece of shit.Do they bulldoze your house anyway.Sounds like imminent domain to a degree.
Sounds Like O’Bullshit wants to start building work camps. Flint - the First American Gulag
You guys need a population increase? Can we send you some of the millions of illegal aliens resident in California?
Great. Shut down the inner cities and the suburbs get ruined.
90% of Detroit could be bull dozed and turned back into productive farm land. Put the remaining people in Quonset huts and have them work the ground and feed their families.
You are operating off the assumption that the local population has any interest in hard honest work. The entitlement mentality is taught from birth, and virtually impossible to undo.
What a clever alternative to growth and prosperity for all.
Like me, I’ll bet the rest of you hate-mongering Conservatives had thought of it.
Y’know… there’s no reason this should cost money either. Manufacture a crisis worth rioting over and the remaining residents will burn it for free. Like Impeach Barry Soetero?
still waiting for the impeachment….but not holding my breath since we have an unchecked Government.
-aTb
LOL! Flint Michigan!? Isn’t that Michael Moore’s home town, and the town he talks about in his “Roger and Me” crapumentary? He needs to make the sequel where his hero Obama is driving the bulldozer crushing the last couple houses.
I’m all for it as long as Moore’s home get bulldozed w/him in it.
““shrink to survive” proposals”
and
“Dozens of US cities…”
Those two phrase are ominous to me. The first for it’s piddly, measly view of the world. Only men w/small dicks would find that vision palatable, so it is no wonder the obama is attracted to the concept.
How about freaking growth and prosperity? How about enriching instead of diminishing? Abort millions, collapse a finacial system, destroy an iconic American industry - and please do consider how symbolic America’s love affair with the road and the car are. Obama no doubt has plans for our roads too (how many ribbons of highways weaving thru our land will be abandoned because they don’t serve the greater bloody good? Highways that have beckoned to the wandering American heart for well over a century. The freedom to just “hit the road” and end up where destiny places you - IT’S GONE,BLOODY G O N E)…
and then to grab our automobiles??? - our Camaros and Mustangs and GTOs???- it’s tantamount to castration.
I bet you every worthless cent I have that that bastard has the smallest dick on the planet. He acting out his long held obsession for destroying all that is more potent, virile and dynamic than he is.
So this article just gets me to imagining that they’d love to herd us into the cities, making it impossible to opt for the long commute because u want to live away from the maelstrom. They want you IN the malestrom, under the ceaseless purview of their cameras and monitoring.
“DOZENS of cities”… and then it will be that little village w/ a mere 5000 people who are deemed to be wasting resources..
They intend to control every way out and all i want to do is buy some land and grab all the kids and grand kids and hunker down…but they r going to make it impossible to escape
God lord when will it end….
I agree with you Zee. I am reminded of what some “enlightened thinkers” wanted to do with Germany after World War II….Completely de-industrialize, disarm, and move the German People back into the Middle Ages with most people confined to rural or semi-rural areas centered around small “urban” enclaves. Why? Because it was felt that the Germans were too war-like, too teutonic, too independent, too whatever for the rest of the human race. I think a similar thing is going on with we as Americans and our “enlightened” politicians.
If you read some of the articles on the Net published from some lefties in a think tank, they are already saying with deadly seriousness that billions of people will need to die world wide in order to bring the human population “into line with the earth’s carrying capacity.” And given that we are the world’s hateful and prodigious consummers the dying needs to start here blah blah blah.
You are right! we are at war with ideas right out of the pit of hell. Please wake up Americans!
Zee I agree with you %100. I live in a very small town outside of Tucson AZ. How long before they label all small towns and suburbs “nonproductive” and start tearing them down.
“The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee.”
Well if they’re abandoned anyway, and they’re truly not forcing anyone to move, I don’t see anything wrong with it. Except this should be done by the state, not enforced by the Fed.
Smells like a 2nd government-manufactured housing bubble in the making…
Yup. You got it. Bulldoze the houses that people can’t sell, and the housing market will correct. It is obvious that is what they are thinking. Screw the owners. Screw free markets. We have bulldozers! These people are so fucking dangerous. I never thought I would see this in on US soil …
I’m seeing a tactic here, as it’s been stated, war has been silently declared.
This is the biggest thing as of now that Obambi has done to protect the troops. Only thing is, it’s the brownshirts or to be more clear the ones that will fight for him.
The last thing they need are abandoned neighborhoods that haven’t been GPS’d that they will have to try and clear. Urbanoinds beware.
Maybe I’m paranoid, I just clearly see it brewing.
oboma is getting our troups out of the country to be fighting for their lives while here in the us of oboma he has his own troops to do his bidding here. People I have been saing wakeup we have no control. Fight it now get organized and stop now. Next stop fema ….
Maybe they are “Making room for the Influx of Muslims & Chinese”?
I think nothing would make that piece of Shit Obama & his Advisers, than to see The American Dream, become the Muslim Dream or Chinese Dream!
Bulldozing cities will be the exact same event that Bulldozing GM and Dodge dealers turned out to be. Gop 42-1
If they bulldoze slums, Obama will give away $500,000 houses to all. Freddie and Fannie have quite a few.
Make no mistake the United States of America is in a states of civil war. Obama, Reid, Pelosi and the Brown Shirts will be coming for your property.
People always forget, in Marxism, communism or socialism the state owns all land and buildings, they tell you where to live and work.
Everyone line up at the railroad station, Obama will take you to your new home………………
Raise fuel prices. Get people to move from the country into the cities where they are easier controlled. You will be forced to use public transportation and if you are lucky enough to have a car it will be one of those juice cans people hate so much. The left hates those of us who live outside of the cities. We are harder to control. We are spread out. Not yet required to endure communal living.
now your onto something so what are we going to do?
Yeah right, bulldoze private houses which could be sold at low cost to low wage workers and gentrified But instead the Govt will build something like a housing project holding 4,000 future drug dealers, whores, stick up boys and burglars.
Concentrate them in one square block and you can gerrymander yourself a new district that will vote for whomever ACORN tell s them to….50 cities eh? Fifty new districts to gerrymander.
Billy
You hit the nail right on the head! Saved me a bunch of typing (I’m a lazy American who consumes more than my 5% population allotment of the Earth). Lemme get up now and crank my AC to 65…. LOL
You have this in Europe.
You ever see Moscow? It’s a pretty drab and butt-ugly place. Or chunks of England? Or the Paris ‘burbs?
They call these gov’t concentrated concrete tower blocks “council flats”. Another social experiment gone awry. Here we call them “projects”.
It’s were people go to live off gov’t dole and wait for death. They live out there lives…concentrated in drab no-hope neighborhoods. In the Paris suburbs this is where all the pissed off young Muslims live, penned in to stew and further hate their society.
In places like Liverpool, this is where the Scouse huddle before planning their next robbery.
You want a glimpse of the results or a picture of what it will look like? Re-acquaint yourself with the movie “Trainspotting” that is what a gov’t run existence looks like. That’s what it yields.
Its all about control.
If they can concentrate you in a smaller area, you are easier to control.
Where is this money coming from?
Why do they have money to bulldoze houses, but no money to lower taxes?
If they lowered the taxes people would have the money to buy these houses.
Maybe they can just drive a Prius through these neighborhoods and the people will become one with nature like in the commercials. Am I the only one that finds these commercials disturbing? The technology to make them is amazing, but there’s something cultish about them.
The whole “Green” thing is a pagan religion. It seems cultish because it is a cult. It is collectivist and totalitarian in nature (no pun intended). The most disturbing thing about it is that unlike orthodox religion it is “politically correct.”
This new plan is as Green as it gets.
“The government is looking at expanding a pioneering scheme…which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.”
This is what enviro-nuts call “rewilding”.
This is in line with the United Nations’ totalitarian New Age-style Green-Communist “sustainable development” goals. Check out Agenda 21 and the other horrific plans adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
“Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in EVERY AREA in which human impacts on the environment.” (http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/agenda21/index.htm)
Agenda 21 has never been debated or adopted by the Congress of the United States. Nevertheless, it is being vigorously implemented by the administrative agencies of the federal government.
What the UN itself has to say about the United States’ implementation of Agenda 21 is quite revealing. One of the 32 specific objectives of Agenda 21 is to create a “National Coordinating Body” in each nation. In the U.S. the NCB is the “President’s Council on Sustainable Development” (PCSD). The United Nations acknowledges that “in the United States, the PCSD was conceived to formulate recommendations for the implementation of Agenda 21.”
This Council is another nightmare brought to us by the Clinton Administration.
“Created by a 1993 Executive Order, the President’s Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD) is explicitly charged with recommending a national action plan for sustainable development to the President. The PCSD is composed of leaders from government and industry, as well as from environmental, labor and civil rights organizations. The PCSD submitted its report, “Sustainable America: A New Consensus”, to the President in early 1996. In the absence of a multi-sectoral consensus on how to achieve sustainable development in the United States, the PCSD was conceived to formulate recommendations for the implementation of Agenda 21.” (http://www.un.org/esa/agenda21/natlinfo/countr/usa/inst.htm)
This latest “rewilding” scheme might be linked to the “Metropolitan and Rural Strategies for Sustainable Communities Task Force” created by the Office of Sustainable Development and Intergovernmental Affairs created back in 1993.
“The Metropolitan and Rural Strategies for Sustainable Communities Task Force continues the PCSD’s mission by developing a toolbox of strategies and actions that provide incentives and remove barriers to implementation of sustainable community initiatives. The purpose of this toolbox is to help communities replicate successful solutions for sustainable community development. The recommendations promote regional, multi-jurisdictional, and multi-stakeholder partnerships by identifying how community and environmental organizations, the private sector, as well as Federal, State, and local government agencies can work together on key issues identified in previous PCSD reports.” (http://www.susdev.noaa.gov/pcsd.html)