Miami tried this, made tolls $7+, it did nothing. And because they put up barriers between the express (toll) lanes and regular lanes, when someone got in an accident in the express lanes, it was FAR slower than the regular lane. The mentality was/is '$7, well its worth it because I can't sit in traffic'
Came here to mention this exact thing -- you don't even have to be an attending, my wife and I have this loan through a different company, and she is still a resident. We had banks fighting over our mortgage. No money down, no PMI, and they portfolio the loan instead of selling it right away like a standard mortgage. We live in a Detroit suburb.
Why would they "portfolio" (I'm inferring this means keep it on their books) such a loan instead of selling it? Because the risk is thought to be so much lower than standard mortgages that keeping it somehow helps them in some way?
The largest issue I've run into with respect to issue tracking is making it accessible and easy to use/understand for the entire team. Non-technical team members don't have GH accounts, they don't know if what they are seeing is a bug, they don't know if its already been reported (because they don't understand the root cause), always seem to be afraid of doing it wrong.
Further, a tool that tracks the resolution of issues into a simple to read 'This was just deployed' or some kind of digest would be insanely useful. It's not an easy task, but so often someone is waiting for a fix, or waiting for a feature, and then gets upset or something gets overlooked because they didn't know the feature/bug was deployed.
Something simple, with an app-store style approach to customization could be really handy.
When you look at it, they have a massive amount of infrastructure for a huge city that lost of a lot of taxable individuals in a relatively quick timeframe. Unless they can move everyone to a more densely populated area of the city and shut down the infrastructure, they have to bear the cost of being a huge city without the tax base of a huge city. That's why tax is so expensive. Well, that and massive corruption.
I wonder if anyone in Detroit calculated pros and cons of "defragmentation": moving people to several designated areas and shutting down infrastructure in vacated blocks. I understand that US is not North Korea and it is easier said than done, but still would be an interesting calculation.
The people that have stuck around thus far tend to be really attached to their current location. If you get them to up and move, they might as easily move to another city (maybe where their kids are) then to the new district.
Which might still be worthwhile, or at least worth considering if things are truly as far gone as they appear from those blight maps. If the city is having to maintain water, power, sewer, etc. to an entire neighborhood for a couple of homes, having those people move to a different city and shutting the entire neighborhood down would probably save a bunch of money.
I grew up in Michigan, and I can say with a good amount of certainty: any house in Detroit that is unoccupied does not have a single thing of value left in it, especially copper. Even some places that are occupied have had their copper stripped from them, sometimes live wires that results in the death of the thief.
EDIT: Some links. Copper theft is a big deal in Detroit.
City of Detroit borrowing a page from scrappers and thieves by selling old copper wire to boost Detroit's finances.
Which you can also resell. You could even scrap the ovens for money and water heaters. There is far more motivation to wreck it than upkeep it. All those houses are goin doooown.
Brick can be recycled but I see what you are saying. And hearing that people are getting killed pulling live wires... That would definitely imply that copper is epic loot in Detroit right now.
Did rails development for 6ish years full time, about 6 months ago I joined a startup using Django. The admin is QUITE nice, its very flexible in terms of models but as well as templates, allowing you to override specific blocks from a standard template, rather than copying a template.
This looks like the very beginning of the Django admin, something that Rails could seriously use. Admin functionality isn't meant to be user friendly, its essentially a CRUD system that mimics your schema.. something that would be quite handy in Rails. While I've always painfully just created my own admin for every project, I've used https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin a few times, and known others who have as well. It's great, but again not nearly as simple as Django.
Personally I would love to see a Django Admin style tool for Rails.
Of course, you do kind of get this with Rails Scaffold, but its not admin, its all user facing as its produced with the model and controller, far from ideal.
