Reuters:

On the auction block in Detroit: almost 9,000 homes and lots in various states of abandonment and decay from the tidy owner-occupied to the burned-out shell claimed by squatters.

Taken together, the properties seized by tax collectors for arrears and put up for sale last week represented an area the size of New York’s Central Park. Total vacant land in Detroit now occupies an area almost the size of Boston, according to a Detroit Free Press estimate.

So it's true: I'm a troll. The worst kind, too: condescending, pedantic, annoying, concerned. I guess we all have our failings, and these are mine. But so long as I'm going to be a purist, I have to rant like one. I like eating and I bet most people do too, that's my "motivation" here.

Hoss asks why urban (commercial) [not/for profit] {large scale/vertical} non-residential gardening is worthwhile. I was a good grrl, I didn't lose my cookies, immediately. But it's Saturday and I'm relaxed and silly, so this comment made me have a Sad:

Wonderful writing and spectacular photos at Detroit Blog about Helen Turner's White Grove Restaurant. Go read the whole thing. This is what she's seeing out the window and at the tables:

She’s behind the counter at White Grove Restaurant, a tiny, genuinely retro diner on Second Avenue near Charlotte, in Detroit’s skid row. Her customers are the city’s underclass — addicts, prostitutes, the homeless and the insane. They spend their days aimlessly roaming their neighborhood here like zombies, slowly killing time and themselves, waiting for the next handout or the next quick score.

“They’re so wrapped up in themselves, they don’t notice anything around them except themselves and what they want,” Martin says.

“They’re petty thieves,” Martin says. “Really, they’ll steal anything. They’ll get it out of the garbage can.” Sometimes they bring in anything shiny or metallic, figuring it must be worth something. “They come to me with this stuff, they don’t even know what it is,” he says.

Just like the banksters!

As usual, Yves has the most interesting links. I like this post mortem the best, because it offers a model of "What the fuck were the Europeans thinking?" Read it all:

This ridiculous thing will be a millstone around the administration's neck for the next three years. Whoever did it cannot have been acting under any sort of instructions.

And, they say that it's "just" a recession. Chaos decided to roost in Detroit, today, as the truly despressed and distressed came out in droves seeking housing and utility payment assistance from the City of Detroit:

The economic tsunami washing over metro Detroit swept its casualties to the doors of Cobo Center on Wednesday in the form of 35,000 people so desperate for help with mortgage and utility bills that threats were made, fights broke out and people were nearly trampled.

Some were treated by emergency medical workers on site.