Stories about Indian Hill
![]() I have publicly asked and privately wondered - is the containment of crime and poverty an American goal and ideal? We are segregating ourselves by economic class through zoning, and real estate values - I don't believe this is race, this is a race to the bottom. If America regresses into one large walled neighborhood, resembling a South American city, we will have lost the essence of democracy and the unity of our culture that Alexis de Tocgueville admired on his 1830's visit to the village of Pontiac, MI: "America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement. The idea of novelty is there indissolubly connected with the idea of amelioration. Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure . . . . Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him. If I were asked . . . to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people [the Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: to the superiority of their women. The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, as either a principal or accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do; this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness." Containment of America's poorest communities is destroy our social fabric. The 'Have and Have Not' chasm is well depicted by the corner of Basswood & Crestwood Streets in Pontiac (behind St Joseph Hospital's $38 million renovation). On the Pontiac side of the wall homes sell for $25,000, and the children go to inferior schools with a 40%+ high school drop out rate. On the other side of this wall, the home is worth over $500,000 in Bloomfield Hills with children who graduate 98% of the time and more often than not get admitted to the college of their choice. When we can fix this disparity in Pontiac, MI... we will have a template to fix America. |
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