My Husband's Hometown Is Shrinking!

My husband is from Flint,Michigan.Most of his family members have had a difficult time obtaining steady employment.The jobs are so sparse that it's tough to make ends meet!Only a few of his relatives have the money that it takes to relocate & they have done just that.For the others,the situation is becoming more & more desperate.It's so sad.

But,they are not alone.The whole city has been in a state of serious decline for years.As the population continues to shrink,the amount of abandoned,dilapidated houses have been on the rise.So,the city of Flint has come up with a plan.

They want to shrink my husband's hometown by demolishing entire neighborhoods and condensing the existing population into the areas that they deem to be "viable."Here's more on the efforts to save Flint from The NY Times:

"Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow this city’s endless decline. Now another idea is gaining support: speed it up.

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.

“Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life,” said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. “We need to control it instead of letting it control us.”

The recession in Flint, as in many old-line manufacturing cities, is quickly making a bad situation worse. Firefighters and police officers are being laid off as the city struggles with a $15 million budget deficit. Many public schools are likely to be closed.

“A lot of people remember the past, when we were a successful city that others looked to as a model, and they hope. But you can’t base government policy on hope,” said Jim Ananich, president of the Flint City Council. “We have to do something drastic.”(END OF EXCERPT)Read the rest here.