Rented or bought home

[Jacob Petersheim]

Be it ever so crumbly, there is no place like home.

There is still construction going on here, and more in serious planning. Much of it seems bizarre though.

Recently a former village shopping center was razed to create a luxury senior high-rise here (4 stories is tall in this small place). Almost all of the rest was soon fenced in and demolished and now plans have been released by the township showing development of low-income row houses and rental hi-rises.

The August 1st ballot here asks for approval of a new "community center" in part housing the "senior center" that closed a while back. They want some $57 million for that!

Another tall luxury condo development recently completed just a little way out to the North edge of the township. Right on a busy and awkward intersection, it has become a traffic nightmare.

Today I ran (literally) across something odd. Several miles to the east a main country road has been dug up and then temporarily paved over. Nothing but cornfields on both sides of the roads, and it isn't on any routes of gas or oil pipelines or fiber optic telecomm trunks. No water lines out there either, and the cut is perpendicular to the roadway anyhow. I have no idea what might be coming, but I suspect expensive walled residential development will appear on both sides of the road.

 

[Yvonne Smith]

We have new houses and lots of new apartments here in Huntsville also; however, the city is actually expanding because of the military and space companies out here. The FBI is putting up more offices on the arsenal, we probably will have the Space Force Command headquarters here, and the new people in the space industry will be using most of the new housing.

Places that are not growing right now, and especially states that have high populations of illegals, will be losing population, and housing should go down in some of those areas.
Michigan has a lot of the Somalian Muslims there, right, @Jacob Petersheim ?
I have been reading that Biden brought a lot of those people in as a sanctuary place for them, but it is quite possible that at least some of them are not citizens and may not qualify for sanctuary now, and will be deported out of the US, from what I have been reading.

The Haitians are being deported back to Haiti, and we have a lot of Chinese who are being deported as well; so it is not just the states that have a lot of Hispanics living there that are going to be having deportations.

 

[Jacob Petersheim]

Michigan has a lot of the Somalian Muslims there, right, @Jacob Petersheim ?

Detroit is home to a significant Somali population, with many establishing themselves in the city over the past few decades, particularly in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They have become prominent in various sectors, including business, particularly in the taxi and livery industry, and as landlords. The Somali community in Detroit is known for its strong community bonds, informal business networks, and significant remittances sent back to Somalia.

We don't see a lot of this in Michigan-proper, though Detroit has sure been getting its share.

Since the "flight" outward to a second ring of suburbs in the late 50s onward, Detroit has seen a number of changes. For a long time the inner suburbs were nearly majority-Jewish, and Hassidics on the sidewalks were a common sight. I haven't been down there since (literally) 9/11 so I really can't say what has changed since then. I haven't seen the rise of Detroit's Islamic population myself.

 

[Don Alaska]

We are getting a lot of construction here as the roads improve and Anchorage becomes less "friendly" to residents. Many form Anchorage are moving out here to what was once the "boonies". I get offers regularly to buy land from us from developers. There is vacant land around, but these developers want to buy from private individuals instead of realtors as they think they can get better prices if the sellers don't know what they are doing.

 

[Mary Stetler]

We are getting a lot of construction here as the roads improve and Anchorage becomes less "friendly" to residents. Many form Anchorage are moving out here to what was once the "boonies". I get offers regularly to buy land from us from developers. There is vacant land around, but these developers want to buy from private individuals instead of realtors as they think they can get better prices if the sellers don't know what they are doing.

Yes, my little farm abuts the (small) city line. A rather well to do subdivision has been going up since I've owned the property. I got another call last week about buying my farm and I told her $5 million. I put an insane price on it once before and now the taxes were just assessed to that value. So I have to raise it to something no one will pay. The farm is still just a farm. Nothing too exciting is done with it but the dollar keeps going down so the price/value goes up. Another extension of the city is going up to the north.

 

[Axel Slingerland]

Since the "flight" outward to a second ring of suburbs in the late 50s onward, Detroit has seen a number of changes.

Not just Detroit. I had three aunts that lived outside of a small down (in the 1960's) called Flushing, near Flint. They each had 5 acres of land, all next to each other. They made wills that if one of them dies, her land would be split between the others. When the last one that survived the other two turned 75, she sold the 15 acres and three large old Victorian houses (not like the Schram House in Flushing, but nice old Vics anyway) for an "undisclosed amount" and moved to parts unknown. Which implies to me, that she felt like she won the lottery, and she didn't want the endless line of family beggers coming after her.