Detroit

Pranksters with too much time on the hands are alleviating their boredom by scavaging around Detroit’s ample supply of abandoned and vacant properties, The Wall Street Journal reports. A staff  videographer even documented a group of perpetrators in the act of pushing a dump truck out a fourth-floor window of an old Packard plant. Click [...]

Over at WalletPop, they’ve looked closer into a big recent auction of foreclosed properties in Detroit, and it’s an even bleaker situation than first reported.
The Wayne County auction of some 9,000 repossessed properties last week resulted in more than 80 percent of them failing to draw a single bid. And that’s even with the minimum [...]

As funding for the $1 billion cash for clunkers program has reportedly dried up less than one week after its launch, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) want answers from the White House about what vehicles are being sold and scrapped under the program. In a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the [...]

With the news that the popularity of cash for clunkers has already consumed the program’s $1 billion allotment comes the inevitable rehashing of the debate over what cars should be eligible for trade-ins if the program is extended.
Earlier in the year, Detroit’s powerful defenders on Capitol Hill pushed through legislation that effectively allowed consumers to [...]

Late Thursday, The Associated Press reported the government would suspend the “cash-for-clunkers” program that provides vouchers worth up to $4,500 to consumers who trade in cars with lower fuel efficiency for cars that get slightly better gas mileage. While the program has been operational for less than one week, it has nearly exhausted its $1 [...]

The Michigan Messenger’s Todd Heywood ran the newest foreclosure numbers from a selection of Michigan counties and found some surprises. In Wayne County, home to Detroit, foreclosures were down substantially in May and June over the same period last year. But the real shocker was in Genesee County, where foreclosures were down by nearly 75 [...]

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm hopes so.

More news from Michigan:
City Councilwoman Monica Conyers has been identified in an FBI bribery probe as “Council Member A,” the city official investigators say received more than $6,000 in cash bribes in exchange for a deciding vote that approved a $1.2 billion sewage disposal contract with the waste management company Synagro Technologies.
According to a report [...]

The Michigan Messenger’s Minehaha Forman has the details:
The FBI has offered Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers a plea deal involving her apparent connection to the Synagro Technologies sludge scandal according to published reports Tuesday afternoon. Conyers, who is married to U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., is suspected of being “Council member A,” a figure investigators [...]

As part of the war-funding deal reached yesterday between House and Senate negotiators, Detroit’s automakers found a $1 billion gift: The launch of a cash-for-clunkers program that focuses more on selling large, otherwise unwanted cars than it does on curbing greenhouse emissions, as the program was initially intended. Detroit News lays out some of the [...]