Ruins of Detroit

[Goodbook]

what do people think about the city of Detroit?
It was a city in america that went bankrupt and most people left. IVe seen pictures, it was a prosperous city in its heyday but then the car industry collapsed and it seems like people just left if they could and found jobs elsewhere, and left it all behind.


Im afraid the same thing could happen to my city, which seems like it cant sustain itself, its already millions of dollars in debt that ratepayers are going to have to pay for all the construction going on so that those born here can hardly afford to live here anymore. It seems to me that forigners could easily buy it up and leave aucklanders homeless.

 

[Goodbook]

ok noone cares, ok.

 

[MWood]

ok noone cares, ok.

What can I say! The same thing can and has happened in a lot of towns and cities in the US. And it is so sad to see a thriving community to turn into a deserted ghost town. All those memories, the good times, the sad times, the friends, the conflicts and disputes; all those memories.

 

[Goodbook]

it has already happened to some towns in nz, small towns that depended on one industry, collapsed, all the jobs went, then all the people. Some of them become tourist attractions.

I just think, well, when a casino gets built and becomes the mainstay, your town has become part of babylon.

 

[DawnStar]

ok noone cares, ok.

It is not that no one cares. It is that this thread has nothing at all to do with prepping. Understand?

 

[SavedByGrace3]

Detroit is like so many other towns and cities. When the US became a service economy rather than an economy based on actually building things... it started downhill. I was part of the US textile industry for 20 years. Most of this was in the southern US. Hundreds of small to medium sized town's economies were based on mills making textiles. Sudden NAFTA came along and the jobs were shipped to Mexico, and now China. So these mills shut down, the jobs went away, and all these little towns turned into ghost towns overnight. Sad. Companies said moving these jobs to other countries was a "business decision." It was greed. Not much you can do about it. Move. Get another job. I went into the IT business. Sad to see all these little towns with boarded up windows and empty parking lots. Everyone moved away except the old and impoverished.

 

[Cernunnos]

It is good to build a diverse set of skills, which can be marketed anywhere. It is good for the white collar to have some blue collar experience so they have something to fall back on. It is good for the blue collar to have some fast food/retail experience for the same reason. It is good to build your skills so that if your mainstay goes away, you can transition into something entirely else. . so your family is cared for . . . .

 

[faroukfarouk]

Detroit is like so many other towns and cities. When the US became a service economy rather than an economy based on actually building things... it started downhill. I was part of the US textile industry for 20 years. Most of this was in the southern US. Hundreds of small to medium sized town's economies were based on mills making textiles. Sudden NAFTA came along and the jobs were shipped to Mexico, and now China. So these mills shut down, the jobs went away, and all these little towns turned into ghost towns overnight. Sad. Companies said moving these jobs to other countries was a "business decision." It was greed. Not much you can do about it. Move. Get another job. I went into the IT business. Sad to see all these little towns with boarded up windows and empty parking lots. Everyone moved away except the old and impoverished.

It used to be that the mobility of labor was regarded as fundamental to a buoyant economy, and a big factor on which prosperity in North America was based.

With both the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations doing massive bailouts (forcing Canadian factories the other side of the Detroit River to do the same), however, it seems the aim is to build automobiles in order to help jobs not to be mobile, rather than for the automobiles to be built that the customers want. (The US Congress is unlikely to submit to the idea of trade adjudication which might send jobs outside the US. However, large corporations are likely to continue to vote with their feet and put the jobs in places where the unions have less influence. Among other things, NAFTA was supposed to be about helping Mexico to strengthen its labor laws; but is it happening? the leader of Mexico's biggest union has to live in Vancouver because of death threats. The big corporations are on the one hand guaranteed by bailouts in the US, and on the other facilitated to build factories more inexpensively in an environment where many workers live in fear.)

Put another way, it raises the challenging question of whether free markets are really believed in any longer. It's a brutal issue.

 

[Goodbook]

Has anyone here had to move from their home town because of the economy?

 

[SavedByGrace3]

Has anyone here had to move from their home town because of the economy?

Had a pretty stable job since 2002. Working in the IT Dept of a state college. All my kids have been fortunate also. Thank the Lord. Praying for those of you who are suffering. Lord take care of my brothers and sisters. I hope the Trump era will be kinder to you.

 

[SavedByGrace3]

But we all had to relocate from the mill town where we lived for 21 years. NAFTA shut all the mills down. Thousand upon thousands of jobs lost. Whole towns died and now are bedroom and retirement communities. Sad.