Jane Byrne Quotes

Detroit can't come close to repairing the decades of neglect without addressing the crisis in our neighborhoods. I live in southwest Detroit near Woodmere Cemetery. My neighbors and I deal with the negative impacts of job loss, increased poverty, and pollution every day.

Neither the Destruction of the Ninth Ward Nor the South Bronx Was Inevitable

Some people see Baltimore as a hopeless place. Some have even made a lot of money on it.

Detroit is a city that really stands out. It's been through a very difficult time. There's been a lot of pain here, and the city, physically, has suffered. You can see it in certain neighborhoods, and there's buildings downtown that have been abandoned.

I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this; if you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

What's wrong with Hell's Kitchen? You don't change a neighborhood by changing its name. You change it by building a school.

We make a mistake when we stereotype neighborhoods as 'bad' and not worth our attention or investment.

I used to walk in the burnt up Harlem of the '80s, and I'd look at brownstones that were dilapidated or apartment buildings, thinking 'Whoever designed this and built this did not want it to look like this.' So, I used to visualize one day being able to contribute and build in Harlem.

I was born October 5, 1957, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Woodlawn area, a neighborhood that hasn't changed much in forty-five years. Our house was on 66th and Blackstone, but the city tore it down when the rats took over.

I would encourage more development in the boroughs outside of Manhattan as well. I think it's great that this natural emergence has occurred in the lower part of Midtown, but there's tremendous potential in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island as well.

We have created thousands and thousands of places in America that aren't worth caring about, and when we have enough of them, we're going to have a country that's not worth defending.

A great American city is fighting for its life.

Gordon Ramsay grew up in a tourist town, Stratford-Upon-Avon, but in a part tourists don't visit - a council estate: a concrete bunker subsidized by the local government, synonymous with deprivation and blight.

There's nowhere like Detroit; it's a modern necropolis: all these art deco masterpieces crumbling away.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

I'm in East L.A., like Mount Washington, Highland Park. There's a little strip that they're gentrifying, trying to make a hip spot, but you go there, and it's just kind of barren. Nobody hangs out anywhere in L.A. There's no loitering in L.A., so I don't know what to do with myself.

Downtown Detroit has more vacant buildings over 10 storeys than any city in the world.

Look what we have built ... low-income projects that became worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.

You cannot let men live like pigs …. We need not wait for the Millennium to get rid of the slum. We can do it now.

The city ... is involved in the fight for its life. One of the critical battlegrounds is the struggle to preserve middle class residential neighborhoods.

I love Milwaukee, the rust belt. It's a very special part of America that's full of promise but also full of pain, where poverty is acute.

You can raze the old buildings and erect magnificent corporate towers, hose down Port Authority, but you can't change people.