Now even the dead are leaving Detroit

It sounds like something out of one of those “Night of the Living Dead” movies. The news story headline:

Flight of the dead: Suburban families move loved ones from Detroit cemeteries

The reason is that violence is so pervasive in Detroit that families no longer want to go even to the cemeteries.

Before my parents retired to Arizona, they went to see my grandparents’ graves in Detroit. When some hoodlums jumped a fence and began approaching them, they retreated to their car and got out fast. Even though my father, a retired district judge, had a conceal-carry permit and was packing a pistol.

That was in 1987. It’s even worse now.

My parents grew up in Detroit and loved the city. They moved to the suburbs only because my father’s law firm posted him there, a few months before I was born in 1955. So I grew up watching Detroit get destroyed.

It was destroyed by leftist and big-business “urban renewal” fanatics. Detroit, much like Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and other Eastern big cities, was a patch-quilt of ethnic groups, not just blacks but others in such areas as Poletown, Greektown, Corktown (Irish), and other areas with Germans, Belgians, Jews, Yugos (Yugoslavs), etc.

The urban renewers destroyed around 22% of the city’s housing stock, most of it in black neighborhoods, to put up freeways and high-rises for the rich. Eminent domain was used to steal the homes of Detroiters, especially the blacks. The blacks were forced to move into “the projects,” instant slums, or into the other ethnic neighborhoods. It was called “integration,” but really was white liberals and business interests socially engineering the city into destruction. First the white ethnics, then most of the blacks moved to the suburbs.

In 1955, the city’s population was nearly 2 million. Now it’s around 800,000 and dropping fast. Instead of “integration” the urban renewers produced a city 90% black, the most segregated big city in the country.

Things are so bad that houses in Detroit are selling for $1.

I didn’t drop any zeroes.

Keep that in mind when our presidential candidates, both Obama and McCain, offer up their housing polices. Click on the links to their names and you’ll see that both are connected to dubious developers that profit from government manipulation of housing and mortgages.

Government should just get out of housing entirely. But it won’t.

There will be more Detroits. Given that something similar might be in the future for your city, here’s a tour of the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.

(h/t to Karen DeCoster of Lew Rockwell’s blog.)