New Houses, Same Neighborhood

New Houses, Same Neighborhood

"Education is the backbone of any successful community. It matters not how much you repair a place if the people who will inhabit it have no education. They will just turn to various forms of crime and end up destroying everything that was created." - Darnell Gardner of Detroit, MI.

Highland Park is a city in Michigan, located inside of Detroit (it's borders are all completely surrounded by Detroit), making it a small city within a major city. It's spreads throughout a little less than 3 square miles. Highland Park's most proud moments were during the early 1900's, when it Henry Ford opened the Highland Park Ford Automotive Plant.

"Ford Motor Company closed the Highland Park plant in the late 1950s, and in the late decades of the 20th century the city experienced many of the same difficulties as Detroit - declines in population and tax base accompanied by an increase in street crime. White flight from the city accelerated after the 1967 Detroit 12th Street Riot. The city became heavily black and impoverished by the 1980s" (wikipedia).

If you put too many ignorant black people, aka niggas, in a good area so that the race makeup of that area becomes over 90% black, they could turn Hampton, NY into the 80's version of South Central, Los Angela's. Well, that's what happened in Highland Park.

Here we are, on a summer-like day, in mid-April 2008. Highland Park, much like it's father city, Detroit, is facing a small tax base, a decline in population (especially among middle class citizens), and high crime rates. Despite all these negative facts, investors and community groups still try to bring back forgotten areas in the city. For that, I applaud them.

Unfortunately, unless you get citizens who care about their environments in these new housing developments, the homes will become much like some of the citizens in them, hopeless. I took it upon myself to drive to one of the areas in Highland Park where public dollars were used to develop starter homes for first-time home buyers. Here's what I found: