on a slow death of a city that was once the heart of the u.s. auto industry that's coming up. the. truck down the freeway system construction not only did we have nine mile back open in hazel park but we're about to see some improvement on eight mile on the detroit self-heal border as crews are close to wrapping up. the way i remember general motors going bankrupt i remember the feeling. not being surprised at all. for us it was you know a day like any other day. people going they're going to work. it wasn't a day like shocking news it was more like the inevitable death of

a very old member of the family. i felt like ok now. we can move on to have a job it'll be easy how do we cheat it has reached a deal is what we're going to acquire a certain it's of. needs to do it it's almost bigger than life it is too rock of gibraltar it can't go bankrupt. it was almost like hearing that. you're a child in your parents that you depend upon for your existence is on life support . there's no showers friday's high holding thirty degrees thirty fourth detroit's car. it was kind of a sad day. and we were just all disbelieving in all that it actually happened. when you have when you're supposed to have some of the smartest guys in charge of

things and they say bankruptcy is the way to go i guess you know you have is the hope that they know what they're talking about that you emerge from that become a better company. they're the type of company that's always said all will just make what the people want. but obviously that's not what they were doing. the bankruptcy of g.m. was kind of you know it it's not really a popular thing to say around detroit but. i was actually pretty excited because i thought for once. maybe this big company had a chance to change. general motors was. still saying to you.

this was this is like. where i played i remember you know playing with my little trucks and this and this for trailing i remember seeing you know in the afternoon the school kids coming and going and then at a different time in the afternoon watching the factory workers walk to work many people just walked you know here in america now everybody drives people drive to the end of their driveway to pick up their mail. but then there's a different kind of a community. it is a great neighborhood really. most of the people who lived here worked for general

motors and buick factories just just a few bar box that way so it was a working class neighborhood it was in a poor neighborhood most of the people who worked in the automobile factories did really well. nobody realized how fragile that economy was because it was always their general motors was actually born here and flint grew up here but people people who worked in the factories especially in the after the nine hundred forty s. made very good wages. more than a college graduate would make. this is a tiny little kitchen. this house like thousands of others . was abandoned and when people leave they don't take their houses with them and

they also don't pay taxes anymore on the property and so my office. is responsible for tax collection and when people abandon their property and stop paying taxes we take that to court and we get a judgment and take ownership of the property so this house now is owned by the land bank we get those properties and we try to make a decision about what to do with them with with all these thousands of abandoned houses. that brings back a lot of memories that heard that bell ring. really on time. because the sounds that i remember. i remember the church bell ringing and then i remember the factory whistle ringing you know the factory whistle saying it's time

for the shift to start course you don't hear that anymore. and think. hey how you doing i'm doing all right. think so you know this the house i lived in when i was a little boy oh yeah. well. this was a city of about one hundred ninety thousand people and we had eighty thousand people working for general motors so the odds are if you had a job in flint it was a job working for general motors or a job that depended on general motors. we're

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much. now i mean the problem we have is that the legacy of general motors what i'm left with i deal with empty houses where g.m. workers used to live with empty buildings where general motors used to have factories with wide open space that used to be a factory and it's now empty you know piece of abandoned property that we now on there's an office building that was once a general motors office building that the milan bank now on so in many ways were left i'm left dealing with the cleanup of this mass. of these are all by i i own all they're all sherry's. each one has

a different role i guess in our lives that see here we have a dump truck that we use that our business the lumber different things trees and stone. things who are here we have the box man which if we want to move things around get what you put things inside plus we hook the mud truck which is the black truck up over there to go to the mud bogs and we haul at the black truck here to the trailer we move our equipment around that the skid sear that sets over there and they ask invader the one next to the black truck over there is the white blazer and what we do with that is go to the sand dunes the plaintiffs say and one for the mud one for the sad. truck cares for got to find it's a farm keep the roads open and stuff right when i drive to work in the wintertime which also has a plow on it white when i drive in the summer time it gets better gas mileage has. and this is my wife's car.

general motors have been number one forever there have been the ones to beat forever you want to talk about a sad day of sad days when toyota announced that they their sales are more than what g.m. is you know that's probably a dated fix will be more than the bankruptcy today. when the president of u.a.w. local six fifty two which stands for the united auto workers union and what i do is i'm in charge of the ministration of the hall of our membership and deal with any problems and become before the membership. might ring

and i'm good i guess we're in the business of some cadillacs. i think they got them in stocks years ago you didn't have to worry about market share because you know it was just a given that people bought because that's what their dad drove or you know you this is what you buy and then slowly you know by not paying attention to use other things on the market and you don't have the loyalties that you used to have you know people just buying because that's what you bought you know somehow it got to be uncool to drive a domestic vehicle. i try to be a negative person and i try to look at what we need to do right i think there put some people in place where they're going to rights and wrongs and i think they're going to be all straight up maybe fly right i mean and i think they owe it to the people they all that to himself it's too good of

a company to see that disappear from the landscape of the of the nation. g.m. donated this building to c.c.'s to use. it's kind of turned into this. at the center of design in detroit with the college that i it's and. just down the hall is the clay studio the computer labs everything is kind of right in these halls where so many infamous and. iconic designs were presented right in this very room. i guess what makes me different from many of my other colleagues and students is that

i focused mainly on sustainable transportation and solutions for. the environmental problems that we have today. coming from car design in a more sustainable way and looking for solutions to the problems it's just it's just crazy that now we're in the space where so many those problems were helped to create. i think general motors at one time represented kind of the pinnacle of the industrial era. how company could become so dominant in a market just through sheer brute force. general motors simply became too large for their own good it's so many brands that they couldn't even keep up with they just basically became a dinosaur. i guess it's just almost fitting that the solutions are going to

come from the same place that generated the problems and hopefully you know myself and the people at the school can do our best to find those solutions. the fischer body plant where pretty much all cars were built from g.m. before they had their own design all the design work and all the bodywork was done by fisher. to me it just represents the glory days of detroit and it's just so strange to see. to see the site and. interest environment around it is just so peculiar.

detroit used to be a very diverse city people lived downtown people walked people took the tram in a sense it was one of the most european cities in its design densely populated easy to get about and it had a very very good public transportation system grand central for growth station. was simply the hub of that the epicenter of of the trains and the trams that ran all around the city. so when the automobile. basically came to be general motors saw. the troll is and the public transportation as competition for their new product and in order to eliminate it basically bought up

that industry and saw to that it was not going to be around so the people in detroit were basically forced into the automobile. we're drawn to the chopping block in general motors people familiar with the situation tell us the next round of layoffs could come of this month g.m. said it would be ten thousand of its seventy three thousand salary positions just like anyone else is to use. the early sixty's sixty two three four five six those are what i call the innocent years you know people begin to make good money things begin to turn around here for african-americans and we as kids begin to

experience a better life than our parents did. you had people migrating up here from the south and with very little education get hired in right away at the plant you know people were coming up here by the bus loads you know and it really built the middle class in southeast michigan so now that you see that lifeline is not gone but it has changed drastically i want to be successful spirit i want to be successful natural i want to be thought of oh financially i want to be theft or mentally come or some out of the way what good is what helps me to help people. in

making wise decisions on stewardship i have a discipline in finances specifically the area of accounting. like that it was going on was. was already god has me here for such a time as this it is no coincidence that greedy grease temple has a pastor who happens to be an accountant. who is it. is the reason. we have a financial plan of the financial times where we have got to put some principles in place and get our sales to care. because we.

where you. regardless of what the economy has got steel cause us ok. and miss so i'm trying to be as long as about three weeks you know me and looking for apartments on farming out of place five hundred miles north of four days is that i will come to you for help with live with my first month's rent and i bet if it's possible i imagine behind a car but then not in the day and by you look across three yards on motivating people in this day in time. is more difficult than it was in my father's pastorate when people were laid off during those decades of you knew how when you would be returning to work so my father's days of motivating was i think a little easier in my day they come to me as

a misfit what am i going to do and i can't say well in six months brains will be better i don't know so we have to exercise a greater faith in god. we're right. but we thank you for this day and for this time it seems in these two you brought together in love and unity we pray that as we move toward the natural. communities all across this country don't know it. but there are one

decision away from being the next flint michigan. i think the cities in america that are willing to rebuild themselves and not simply pretend that we are the city that we used to be ironically are the cities that are going to be best positioned for growth in the future. now it's a city that is built for twice the number of people that we actually have so we think the kind of successful city that flint can be is going to is going to require that it become cleaner smaller. more sustainable. but also not every you know ever again. become dependent on one company.

we've got thousands of abandoned houses we've got more houses than we have people so rather than simply selling those properties off to speculators that's the whole idea is that we get the property into the hands of land bank turn to turn to the neighborhood you know and there were areas where. is one was we had gardens this spring i'm going to go more to southern food because i went to the farmer's market this year and the first day the i had crowd of peas black eyed peas purple hoes and they sold out a media in there really i did not have enough so i know that we have young children i had ten children here teens for fourteen twenty one teach them how to grow how to become a business person and how to understand how food grows and may be interested in agriculture and to me it's the social connections that the neighborhood becomes a tidy unit you build the community around it really i mean i know just from seeing

the neighbors come out. here a lot of times neighbors would come and talk with this goal it's like a center for the neighborhood. in the far away land. where human life is ruled by nature. the distant past of planet earth is scarcely preserved by the poor. international modes lie hidden in the deep permafrost. and to those who deal with them. stored times are still not just for the. very first verses of the bible that all human beings are created but some of it all came in god's image and it doesn't say just jews or dodgers. sixty to seventy percent of

what i did as a combat soldier not to buy territories was to do with the turds doing what we call making our presence felt to go out should some bozo they hear a knock on some doors run to the other corner invade another house religion and nationalism not just judaism have been a part of the problem they've been part of what leads to. bloodshed if you want to bomb guys and kill a thousand four hundred people in a month and you want to expect that this will have no effect until a few you have to be either extremely naive or extremely stupid ok do you not to hear a few religious jew calling another joe and not not the way they really didn't. think. he.

fifty. fifty fifty fifty fifty

. president obama sets up a standoff at the un general assembly with sovereignty seeking palestinians set to clash with a veto holding us despite overwhelming international support plus. banging the drum for a new nation thousands of palestinians pour into the streets of the west bank in support of the bid for statehood at the u.n. . on having the palestinian fifty of them i know where these two been and any plans meant on the street as people celebrate if you stop me occasion join me in a few moments and i'll bring you will. and the eurozone teetering under its rapidly piling debts with greece trying to speed up cuts and the i.m.f. warning of a new recession may be looming. and while europe is struggling to avoid slipping back into recession russia's finance ministers say that russia will have fully rick .