A Brit visits Detroit

Amid the socialist smarm, there are some good lines here:

The drive along eerily empty ghost freeways into the ruins of inner-city Detroit is an Alice-like journey into a severely dystopian future. …

Approaching the derelict shell of downtown Detroit, we see full-grown trees sprouting from the tops of deserted skyscrapers. In their shadows, the glazed eyes of the street zombies slide into view, stumbling in front of the car. Our excitement at driving into what feels like a man-made hurricane Katrina is matched only by sheer disbelief that what was once the fourth-largest city in the US could actually be in the process of disappearing from the face of the earth. The statistics are staggering – 40sq miles of the 139sq mile inner city have already been reclaimed by nature.

One in five houses now stand empty. Property prices have fallen 80% or more in Detroit over the last three years. A three-bedroom house on Albany Street is still on the market for $1.

Since this was a piece for the Guardian, the author of course has to place all the blame on racist capitalists. I didn’t see much mention of when Detroit elected its last non-Democrat mayor or city council, however. There was, however, one non-socialist little message slipped in… the editor must have missed it:

Unable to buy fresh food for their children, people are now growing their own, turning the demolished neighbourhood blocks into urban farms and kick-starting what is now the fastest-growing movement across the US. Although the city is still haemorrhaging population, young people from all over the country are also flooding into Detroit – artists, musicians and social pioneers, all keen to make use of the abandoned urban spaces and create new ways of living together.

While many of these people may well *be* socialists, what they are doing, they’re doing on their own, of their own volition. The “urban farms” are an infinitely preferable solution to the usual collectivist approach of using taxpayer funds to ship in a perpetual source of food from outside… not only draining funds from non-Detroiters, but also growing government power and chaining the Detroiters to the government teat. If the National Guard would simply do a sweep of the city and round up the crackheads, criminals, local government officials and other scumbags and deport them to, say, Cuba (I understand the Mariel Harbor might be a good place to ship large n umbers of people through), the remaining Detroiters could perhaps be left free to make a new beginning for themselves