Dustin Black > Recent Status Updates

“Undesirables are not themselves much of a problem. It is the measures taken to combat them that is the problem. Places designed with distrust get what they were looking for.”

“Process adds layer of abstraction to political decisions. It distances the decision-maker from their decisions.”

“Process adds a layer of abstraction to political decisions.”

“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”

“Some men who cheat their wives out of grocery money wouldn’t think of cheating the grocer. Men tend to carry their honesty in pigeonholes.”

“Hard-headed hill folk don’t understand coastal-plain dreamers.”

“When Jean Louise was ten, she made her only attempt to join a crowd, and she asked Sarah Finley one day, “Can I come to see you this afternoon?” “No,” said Sarah, “Mamma says you’re too rough.” Now we’re both lonely, for entirely different reasons, but it feels the same, doesn’t it?

"You've got to have a culture of entrepreneurship," Charlton told me. "Our challenge is not to disperse people with great entrepreneurial skills. It's to keep them close together because we've got to build this culture and knowledge of managed risk-taking. And that's key to it. I can't emphasize that enough."

“The basic unit of urban recovery is the vacant lot.”

“The city’s main arterial surface streets, such as Jefferson, Gratiot, and Woodward, became nine-lane highways linking downtown to the rapidly growing suburbs. And everyone thought it was a great idea. As it turned out, if you were designing a city to be easily abandoned, you couldn’t have come up with a better plan than Detroit’s.”

“A posh suburb like Bloomfield Hills presents a very pleasant prospect indeed, but if we could transfer the same amount of open space to Detroit - take those same deep setbacks and the same wide spacing between occupied buildings, and overlay it in a Google Earth image of the city - we would find the suburban land use more or less matches what’s left in Detroit today.

“Building well need not mean building lavishly.”