Suggesting that these houses be given to homeless or poor is noble- but ludicrous. Do you know anyone who is willing to gift their personal property to a stranger? Maybe you are willing to start a new gov. program to get this idea started. Also, these homes are in neighborhoods that sometimes look a lot like this. No grocery stores, no public schools. If the poor person who just received his/her home didn’t have a car, they couldn’t get to work. And how would they repair a home that is so terribly damaged?

While we wait for you to cut the red tape, convince thousands to give up freely give their personal property and educate/round up qualified-to-own-homes homeless, I will sit here and watch the house across the street become infested with rats. A home for drug dealers and prostitutes. Become ground zero for the rest of my neighborhood experiencing a boom in crime.

What we need to be doing is repurposing the urban landscape to better fit the needs of those who remain. If we can build proper, cheaper, more environmentally friendly housing, then maybe those who are having housing problems can more easily afford it.

Most poignantly, it talks about Hurricane Katrina, which focused attention on rebuilding another city with this level of devastation, and how without a single catastrophic event to blame for it, Detroit’s decay has gone unsympathetically ignored.

The movie wraps up by observing this, how abandoned buildings and spaces are being reclaimed by nature. About the pop fiction which explores the concept of a post-human world, and how it already exists now. And about how, if you’re a pheasant, that’s not such a bad thing.

1) Beautiful.
2) I’d love to explore those.
3) What a huge waste.
4) Sad, that these people’s homes can end like this. Sad for the people, sad for the homes.
5) Poetic, in a kind of high school photography class way.
6) It would be cool to have packs of feral dogs around, I think.

http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/index.php?/prairies/feral-houses/

Thanks for linking to my portfolio site; but I also run the blog that Cory linked to today, so both of them are technically mine.

This is a city that has outlived its population, and funding is desperately needed to raze these vacant neighborhoods to eliminate sanctuaries for crime drugs and violence, turn them into parks and green spaces, and give our overextended police force less territory to cover.

It’s time to give a large portion of the Motor City back to Mother Nature.

The one silver lining to the collapse of the economy is that a surplus of housing has made housing more affordable for poor people. Now you want to roll that back too? Hey, maybe if we demolish enough houses, we can get our property values back up…we’ll be back in the heady days of the boom!

If the razing of almost an entire city doesn’t demonstrate the profound perversity of capitalism, i don’t know what will.

After the crazy, oppressive heat and blood-red sun today, I think L.A.’s future distopia is going to be more of a desert or moonscape. It’s not as likely to succumb to industrial collapse, unless Hollywood goes out of business (fat f*ing chance of that ever happening).

Maybe it will be more like Escape From L.A.. Yeah! That will rock!

I’d have added to the ‘Previously’ list the story about the guy who has a wee business hunting racoons in downtown Detroit and selling the pelts and meat.

I can imagine reclaiming derelict shopping malls as public space. Especially in LA, where we really need it.

To me this is beautiful and extremely uplifting.