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.

Go ahead and make all the jokes you want; Detroit is and likely will be an easy target. But I found this Craig's List ad quite interesting.

We've got two options when it comes to all the soon to be unused real estate and "development" in this country. We can leave it to rot, and thus makeover the nation in the image of Detroit in the 70s; or we can accept that what a friend calls 'the suburban-industrial complex' model of the economy isn't ever going to come back, and thus different approaches to development are required.

Big Blue has yet another post about the collapse of the Inland Empire, and I'm sure a review of housing and real estate blogs would show equally grim news for overdeveloped regions all over the country. The truth is, the economic situation we find ourselves in comes in large part from the mythology of the ever-expanding American realty bubble. We let deregulation go too far, and the banking industry took that myth and fucked our entire economy with it when it burst. But like a lot of us hippy crunchy types have been saying for a long time: cheap energy, cheap imported supplies, and cheap credit can't go on forever. That day is here.

I don't know much about this Detroit deal other than the fact that downtown really could use some smart development, and I like the way this sounds. It's time for all of us to take steps to make sure those with different approaches to development to be given their turn. I often imagine what could be done with the decaying, empty strip malls and shuttered big box stores that are popping up with increasing frequency where I live. But I'm also not so hopeful that state and local governments will act in time, and repurpose those properties before the decay makes them uninhabitable. Perhaps I'm wrong in that, and approaches like the one found in this link will become more common than I'd imagined.

And if it's not just Detroit then it can't really be the fault of the UAW now can it?

Europe's motor industry is in a panic. In boardrooms across the continent the talk is of the biggest emergency for 60 years -- or at least since the 1973 oil crisis.

As executives ask the European Union for a €40-billion bail-out to match or surpass the $25-billion sought by the American Big Three manufacturers -- General Motors, Ford and Chrysler thousands of staff are being laid off. Sales are collapsing as the recession bites, with vehicles stacking up at ports around the world.

Black Agenda Report

Should the auto industry get a Wall Street style blank check bailout? Or is this the ideal time to make US auto and other industrial jobs globally competitive by enacting the kind of single payer health care system every other wealthy industrial nation on the planet uses?

As I have said before, it is not a coincidence that the chief sponsor of single payer represents Detroit.