Articles About Detroit

In the largest bankruptcy filing by a city ever, Detroit filed Chapter 9. The effect of bankruptcy could be devastating on the public sector. The man at the center emergency manager for the city, Kevyn Orr, who has since been negotiating with Detroit’s many bondholders and other creditors about restructuring the city’s debt. Those negotiations […]

Several banks have found a new solution to the glut of foreclosed houses – many of them in poor condition.  It’s the bulldozer. Bank of America (BoA) owns a glut of abandoned houses that no one wants to purchase.  As a result, the nation’s largest mortgage servicer is bulldozing some of its most uninhabitable inventory.  Additionally, […]

President Barack Obama and the nation’s predominant automakers have agreed to increase new vehicles’ fuel mileage.  The major way to accomplish this is to reduce the size of vehicles.  By 2025, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) must be 55.4 mpg for cars.  That’s up from the 2009 Obama mandate of 35.5 mpg by 2016. […]

It’s going to rain.  According to a study by climatologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Texas Tech University, temperatures in Chicago will continue rising over the next century, largely due to human emissions of heat-trapping gasses.  The strength of that warming trend and the impact it brings depends on the amount of […]

Detroit is undergoing a radical downsizing – the most ambitious urban makeover in American history – that will shrink the city’s current 139-square-mile footprint to approximately half that size as abandoned neighborhoods are consolidated and returned to productive farmland. Mayor Dave Bing, a former Detroit Pistons player and All Star, is determined to shrink the […]

New York-based photographer Gregory Holm returned to his hometown of Detroit to draw attention to the nation’s housing crisis by coating an abandoned house with a sheet of ice.  Called the Detroit Ice House, the project was designed to inspire residents of a city with thousands of vacant homes and a foreclosure rate that is […]

Home prices nationally are on the rise again, according to a new report issued by the Standard &Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index. The average sale price rose 3.1 percent during the third quarter of 2009, the same percent increase reported during the second quarter.  On the downside, that statistic is still nine percent lower than the […]