Detroit thread. Post Kwame, Monica, and $1 houses here.

[Savonarola]

Sav, how endogamy bound are Chaldean women in Detroit?  If I end up in Ann Arbour, I'd probably end up trying to date at least one Assyrian.

Not very, unless you're looking for someone straight off the boat.  Chaldeans have been living in Detroit since the 1920s; they're about as ethnic as the Greeks or Italians.

Are you looking at graduate school at Michigan?

[Savonarola]

Detroit seems to be the right place to produce "Fallout: The Movie". 

Seriously, comparing Hiroshima and Detroit, you wouldn't guess it was the former that got nuked.

Luckily our governor cut a sweetheart deal with movie studios and Hollywood is starting to shoot movies here.  Look for post apocalyptic crime dramas at your box office soon.   

[Ed Anger]

Michigan football sucks.

[Queequeg]

Sav, how endogamy bound are Chaldean women in Detroit?  If I end up in Ann Arbour, I'd probably end up trying to date at least one Assyrian.

Not very, unless you're looking for someone straight off the boat.  Chaldeans have been living in Detroit since the 1920s; they're about as ethnic as the Greeks or Italians.

Are you looking at graduate school at Michigan?

Yeah, I am.  Not sure yet, though. 

[Savonarola]

Yeah, I am.  Not sure yet, though.

What program?

[Savonarola]

I have seen the future and it photosynthesizes:

Farm could make Detroit hot spot for fresh foods
BY JOHN GALLAGHER • FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER • April 2, 2009


Businessman John Hantz of Detroit, in an exclusive interview with the Free Press, unveiled his plans for Hantz Farms -- a concept that would convert hundreds, even thousands, of vacant parcels in the city into urban agriculture.

Offering jobs and an ability to produce fresh fruits and vegetables locally, Hantz Farms could help Detroit "become a destination for fresh, local and natural foods and become a major part of the green movement," Hantz said.

Detroit already is home to hundreds of smaller community gardens. But Hantz's proposal is the first to envision large-scale commercial farming.

He said he could grow everything from Christmas trees to fruits and vegetables, with amenities such as a cider mill or horseback riding available.

With an estimated 40 square miles of vacant parcels, Detroit offers many sites where, in theory, a big farm operation might work. Hantz, a resident of Detroit's Indian Village district, is tentatively looking at a blighted area near Eastern Market, but exact boundaries would depend on whether he wins the city's cooperation.

A look at the plan
George Jackson, the city's chief development officer and president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., said he is evaluating Hantz's proposal.

"I'm going to look at this as I would any development deal," Jackson said.

Land assemblage remains a key question. Hantz owns several parcels in the city, but the vast majority of the acreage he needs for his project is still either owned by private parties or is tax-foreclosed land owned by the city, county and state.

Hantz envisions the city, county and state donating the land to his project or selling it at a nominal cost. The payback would come in increased tax revenues once the farm is up and running.

Hantz is chief executive of Hantz Group, a network of financial services firms based in Southfield.

He also owns the Detroit Ignition of the Xtreme Soccer League.

Vacant land solution?
Matt Allen, onetime press secretary to former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, manages the project as senior vice president of Hantz Farms.

Allen said Hantz Farms is a good solution for vacant land.

"What is it worth to the city just sitting there? Nothing," he said. "Part of the approach to this is that, the larger this becomes, the benefit gets greater and greater faster."

Even as a concept, the idea is controversial.

Jeffrey Armstrong, dean of the Michigan State University College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, called Hantz Farms "a challenging and exciting opportunity."

But Rebecca Salminen Witt, president of the nonprofit Greening of Detroit, said small community plots do more good for Detroiters, helping knit communities together.

"Folks are hoping for, wishing for, looking for a silver bullet to the vast expanses of vacant space that we see in the city," Witt said. "And because of that, they want to say, 'Great, we'll just plunk a couple-of-hundred-acre growing operations here and there.' "

Allen responded that there ought to be a place for both community gardens and commercial farms in Detroit.

"There's more than enough land to go around," he said.

I just heard on the news yesterday that a full 1/3 of Detroit is vacant land.  Historically what is today the city of Detroit was some of the richest farm land in the state.  The idea isn't a terrible one, but I really doubt the Detroit city council will zone tracts of the city as rural.

[Valmy]

I think that is a great idea.  Just like the urban farms of Constantinople it would allow Detroit to also weather long sieges.

[Savonarola]

Not to outdone by the Freep, the News has an article on urban hunting:

To urban hunter, next meal is scampering by
Detroit retiree, 69, supplements his income by living off the land
Detroit - When selecting the best raccoon carcass for the special holiday roast, both the connoisseur and the curious should remember this simple guideline: Look for the paw.

"The paw is old school," says Glemie Dean Beasley, a Detroit raccoon hunter and meat salesman. "It lets the customers know it's not a cat or dog."

Beasley, a 69-year-old retired truck driver who modestly refers to himself as the Coon Man, supplements his Social Security check with the sale of raccoon carcasses that go for as much $12 and can serve up to four. The pelts, too, are good for coats and hats and fetch up to $10 a hide.

While economic times are tough across Michigan as its people slog through a difficult and protracted deindustrialization, Beasley remains upbeat.

Where one man sees a vacant lot, Beasley sees a buffet.

"Starvation is cheap," he says as he prepares an afternoon lunch of barbecue coon and red pop at his west side home.

His little Cape Cod is an urban Appalachia of coon dogs and funny smells. The interior paint has the faded sepia tones of an old man's teeth; the wallpaper is as flaky and dry as an old woman's hand.

Beasley peers out his living room window. A sushi cooking show plays on the television. The neighborhood outside is a wreck of ruined houses and weedy lots.

"Today people got no skill and things is getting worse," he laments. "What people gonna do? They gonna eat each other up is what they gonna do."

A licensed hunter and furrier, Beasley says he hunts coons and rabbit and squirrel for a clientele who hail mainly from the South, where the wild critters are considered something of a delicacy.

Though the flesh is not USDA inspected, if it is thoroughly cooked, there is small chance of contracting rabies from the meat, and distemper and Parvo cannot be passed onto humans, experts say.

Doing for yourself, eating what's natural, that was Creation's intention, Beasley believes. He says he learned that growing up in Three Creeks, Ark.

"Coon or rabbit. God put them there to eat. When men get hold of animals he blows them up and then he blows up. Fill 'em so full of chemicals and steroids it ruins the people. It makes them sick. Like the pigs on the farm. They's 3 months old and weighing 400 pounds. They's all blowed up. And the chil'ren who eat it, they's all blowed up. Don't make no sense."

Hunting is prohibited within Detroit city limits and Beasley insists he does not do so. Still, he says that life in the city has gone so retrograde that he could easily feed himself with the wildlife in his backyard, which abuts an old cement factory.

He procures the coons with the help of the hound dogs who chase the animal up a tree, where Beasley harvests them with a .22 caliber rifle. A true outdoorsman, Beasley refuses to disclose his hunting grounds.

"This city is going back to the wild," he says. "That's bad for people but that's good for me. I can catch wild rabbit and pheasant and coon in my backyard."

Detroit was once home to nearly 2 million people but has shrunk to a population of perhaps less than 900,000. It is estimated that a city the size of San Francisco could fit neatly within its empty lots. As nature abhors a vacuum, wildlife has moved in.

A beaver was spotted recently in the Detroit River. Wild fox skulk the 15th hole at the Palmer Park golf course. There is bald eagle, hawk and falcon that roam the city skies. Wild Turkeys roam the grasses. A coyote was snared two years ago roaming the Federal Court House downtown. And Beasley keeps a gaze of skinned coon in the freezer.

With the beast fresh from the oven, Beasley invites a guest to lunch.

He believes coon meat tastes something like mutton or pork, but to the uneducated pallet, it has the aroma and texture of opossum.

While Beasley preps his coon with simple vinegar brine and spices, there are 100 ways to cook a coon.

There is roast coon with sweet potato, sausage and corn bread stuffing; raccoon cobbler and roast marinated raccoon with liver and onion. It is this reporter's opinion that the best sauce for coon may very well be hunger.

The story of Glemie Dean Beasley plays like a country song. The son of a sharecropper, Beasley left school at 13 to pick cotton. He came to Detroit in 1958. His woman left him in 1970 for a man he calls Slick Willy.

Someone stole his pickup truck and then someone killed his best dog.

"I knowed some hard times," Beasley says. "But a man's got to know how to get hisself through them hard times. Part of that is eating right."

[Valmy]

Wow Austin is far larger than Detroit now.  Well when the city collapses we will take your sports teams.

[Savonarola]

Wow Austin is far larger than Detroit now.  Well when the city collapses we will take your sports teams.

The 900,000 figure is only the city proper; the metro area is much larger than that.

[Valmy]

The 900,000 figure is only the city proper; the metro area is much larger than that.

Oh yeah you have 4.5 million counting the metro area.  Nevermind then.

[Caliga]

Sav, how endogamy bound are Chaldean women in Detroit?  If I end up in Ann Arbour, I'd probably end up trying to date at least one Assyrian.

Your racism amuses me.  OTOH, I have a friend whose wife is a Chaldean I believe (she's some flavor of Iraqi native Christian) and she is insanely HOTT.

[Malthus]

Not to outdone by the Freep, the News has an article on urban hunting:

"Today people got no skill and things is getting worse," he laments. "What people gonna do? They gonna eat each other up is what they gonna do."

... and when they do, he'll be ready (I was gonna say "prepared"). 

[charliebear]

Well when the city collapses we will take your sports teams.

You could probably get the Lions fairly cheap.

[charliebear]

Michigan football sucks.

Yes.  Yes, it does.