Post by BykerPost by The StarmakerIf you let a pig into a soul food restaurant
Speaking of soul food restaurants, when Anthony Bourdain ("No
Reservations") visited Detroit, he went to a cafeteria that had been
catering to the black community for a long time. The place was packed
with seemingly well-behaving blacks, yet I couldn't help but notice the
bulletproof glass between the serving line and the customers. I can
image what justified its installation.
In Bourdain's CNN series, "Parts Unknown," he said, "Is Detroit going to
turn things around? I could lie and tell you yes. But you know what?
This city is screwed. The only place I've ever been that looks anything
like Detroit does now, is Chernobyl. I'm not being funny. That's the
truth."
I wouldn't be too sure of that. Detroit is the way it is today because
of the "white flight" that occurred after blacks began migrating into
the city. Ironically, blacks only settle in cities with services, and
as the Detroit city services start to decay (e.g., public transit),
the blacks are fleeing the city for the suburbs. Instead of inner-
city poverty, they now complain about suburban poverty, which have none
of the services (e.g., buses, metro, nearby groceries) that city
residents enjoy.
Though Detroit has a long way to go, I can envision a future where
whites move back as the public services are restored and the blacks
are gone. You can see this phenomenon in San Francisco, where
blacks have been "gentrified" out of the city, to the point where
white liberal yuppies express their deep concern that the African-
American population of the city has dropped to 6%.
With the blacks gone, the abandoned buildings demolished and turned
into parks and new industrial zones, it is not hard to envision
whites and Asians moving in and snapping up properties at
depressed prices. It will take several decades for the city to
heal, but its strategic location along the Great Lakes, along with
the absence of the ethnic group that ran the city into the ground,
Detroit will once again become an important industrial city. It
will likely be tech-oriented, with custom production replacing
the mass-production that was offshored years ago.