'Detroit Scrap City'

welcome to the new economy........picking thru the ruins for profit.........from inthesetimes.........

"In the last decade, 250,000 people have left Detroit. An estimated 60,000 buildings sit abandoned. As the city empties, the millions of tons of copper, aluminum, brass, steel, iron and tin used to erect the Motor City are being shipped out, in the form of scrap, much of it to China.

As Detroit’s jobs continue to disappear and the foreclosure crisis swells its ranks of vacant buildings, an increasing number of residents have turned to scrapping. For some, like Mo, scrapping is a profession. For others, it’s just another hustle, like collecting cans or passing out handbills, one of the dozens of marginal occupations in a city in which a quarter of the population has no job.

“First week of the month is always the slowest,” says Stanley Beltzman of McNichols Scrap Iron & Metal, a scrap yard on the city’s east side. “That’s when the checks come in.”

“If [scrappers] see a house is unoccupied, within two weeks it’s stripped,” says Tom Fayz, president of the Springdale-Woodmere Block Club, located in the city’s southwest side.

Last year, scrappers in his neighborhood pulled down two telephone poles with a pickup truck just to get at the transformers, robbing residents of electric and phone service. The crime occurred in broad daylight, next to an elementary school..................LINK