Thursday, October 22, 2009

Time Out

Time Magazine takes a look at Flint:

"No place has felt the pain of General Motors' collapse quite as completely as Flint, Mich., which is about an hour's drive north of Detroit. Back in the early 1970s, GM had as many as 80,000 employees around Flint, making it one of the premier company towns in the U.S. But as GM's fortunes have fallen, so have those of Flint. GM is still the largest employer in town by far, but its Flint payroll has dropped to fewer than 8,000. Meanwhile, the Genesee County Land Bank owns more than 4,000 vacant residential properties in and around Flint, which had 124,000 residents at the last census. Today, streets are mostly abandoned, the average value of a single-family home has dropped to $16,400 and the city's unemployment rate hovers at 27%, which is two points better than it was in August when it hit 29%. "


No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.