Face to face with recession in a beleaguered Motor City

DETROIT -- Immediately after exiting the Edsel Ford Expressway onto Van Dyke Avenue, you come face to face with the impact of the economic recession in America's automotive capital. This was never the best of neighborhoods, even in the best of times. But these days, every other storefront is boarded up, adorned with a "for sale" sign, or has its windows busted out. Turn into an adjacent residential area, and modest homes are separated by large, overgrown spaces where foreclosed-upon houses have been torn down.

A house sits boarded up in Detroit.

Detroit has the largest foreclosure rate of any major city in America, a fact that's much more than a statistic in the neighborhoods between Van Dyke and the downtown airport. Many homes remain occupied, and it's clear that many of the owners are working hard to upkeep them. But every fourth or fifth house is boarded up, or burned from the inside, or has completely collapsed into the tall grass. And then there are the open spaces where houses used to be, and where weeds now hide whatever foundations remain. Faced with such a chronic foreclosure and abandonment problem, the city has placed an emphasis on demolition.

Certainly this is a region where there are still nice areas, where there are fabulous mansions owned by the descendants of automotive pioneers, where many of the homes still bear the ornate stonework and ornamentation that once gave Michigan's largest city such architectural significance. But in many ways this blighted east side neighborhood has come to define Detroit, a place clearly reeling from the job losses and plant closings and bankruptcy filings on the part of Chrysler and General Motors. Eighteen percent of Michigan International Speedway's fan base comes from this city. Suddenly, it's very easy to see why attendance is down at the NASCAR track 75 miles away. (Continued)