Motley Moose – Archive

I apologize up front.  I am not the person to write this.  I admit to being white and somewhat privileged.  While I went to public school, it was a high quality public school in a comfortable suburb.  We had one token black family in my high school.  Therefore, my opinions here are not from an experiential viewpoint but are from somewhere else.

In its heyday, Flint, Michigan had nearly 200,000 residents and was the governmental seat of one of the wealthiest counties in the country. Since those days in the early 1970’s, the population has dropped by 45% and poverty rates have skyrocketed. The future seems bleak. A 2008 Forbes article named Flint one of “America’s Fastest Dying Cities.”

Many people are working to halt Flint’s decline. The Downtown Development Authority has revitalized a moribund main street and the local land bank has repurposed many empty properties. The Genesee County Land Bank in Flint has been recognized by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government as a national model for getting vacant property and land back on the tax rolls.

“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” – Robert Kennedy