
Black Beekeepers Are Transforming Detroit’s Vacant Lots into Bee Farms (2018) - rmason
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/detroit-hives-honeybees_n_5a6cfc9ee4b0ddb658c7019c
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dragontamer
Detroit is an interesting case of how a shrinking city becomes useful for some
investors.

IIRC, I was looking up the prices of various lots, and many homes were $1000!
Now, I don't live anywhere close to Detroit, but the idea of spending maybe
$10,000 to $100,000 for dozens or even hundreds of houses is interesting.

Developing for humans may be a problem: Hundreds-of-thousands of people have
left Detroit, leaving the city in the state that it is in today. But the
houses and infrastructure (roads, water, electricity) may be useful for some
niches, even in a "ghost town" situation (Or perhaps: more of a "ghost suburb"
situation. Neighborhoods with shrinking populations will naturally have weaker
schools, causing more people to leave, causing taxes to go up on the remaining
people, causing more people to leave, etc. etc. Its a bad death-spiral
effect).

I think I recall an article about how one writers group was buying up
neighborhoods to station writers-circles, effectively creating a community of
writers imported from around the country to one location, so that the writer-
circle can leverage each other as an author support group.

I haven't heard of this Bee Farm thing, but I would have expected that sort of
thing to be better in a more rural community.

In any case: redeveloping all of that land and making it useful (as opposed to
broken down neighborhoods with crumbling infrastructure) is a big question for
Detroit... and investors / businessmen. There's probably a lot of opportunity
there.

~~~
wil421
Many of the homes came with a caveat that you have to bring it up to code. The
home was only a $1,000 but the renovation costs were 10s of thousands.

~~~
DrStalker
You also become responsible for any unpaid property taxes, because they are
attached to the property rather than to the person who owned it when the debt
was incurred.

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acollins1331
what the hell

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scottmcf
That's why they are so cheap.

~~~
mymythisisthis
Shitty that an accountant policy is hurting a city.

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usrusr
Meanwhile in Berlin, concerns that excessive urban beekeeping might be putting
too much competetive pressure on wild bee species made minor national news.
(probably not so much because the situation is actually dramatic but more
because the story is both surprising and confirming of "clueless Berlin
hipster sustainability" stereotypes)

Did not find a good source in English, just a German article:
[https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/kritik-an-
bienenkaesten-a...](https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/kritik-an-
bienenkaesten-auf-hochhaeusern-experte-wirft-berliner-imkern-tierquaelerei-
vor/24304670.html) and a terrible translation thereof:
[https://www.archysport.com/2019/05/criticism-of-bee-boxes-
on...](https://www.archysport.com/2019/05/criticism-of-bee-boxes-on-
skyscrapers-expert-accuses-berlin-beekeepers-animal-cruelty-berlin/)

~~~
stinos
Came here to post similar. I don't think there are enough and/or large scale
studies already, but there are 'local' studies showing negative effects of
honeybees on wild bees (and all other pollinators, not to forget). It depends
on a number of factors of course, but the general idea is pretty logical:
suddenly there's a thousand extra eaters in your area but the amount of food
didn't change. Meaning unless you have enough food for all, some are going to
suffer. So most people I know with a job in nature conservation and similar
think it's really about time this gets studied properly and then possibly
regulated; not just Berlin has problems. There are places in the Netherlands
and Belgium for instance where beekeepers drive the hives to the border of
nature reserves to have their bees have a go at them. If that happens to be a
place with only a small population of an endangered pollinating species left,
it's not unlikely they will be effected negatively. At the same time there
seems to be a rise in people interested in 'amateur' beekeeping, at least
around here. And from experience they either simply don't realize that might
be a problem, or they just ignore it / don't want to believe it because they
think they're doing a good thing, taking care for bees (even though it is
debatable whether it's really ok to just take their honey), solving the global
bee decline, etc. tldr; the initiative sounds good but there might be unwanted
and unknown side effects.

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samstave
Detroit is such an amazing opportunity for anyone with money.

Buy up a shit ton of property for extremely low prices - it already has city
infra, power, water, etc.

Install solar on lots. Bui;d a fucking datacenter for pennies on the dollar
compared to other places.

Install municipal wifi with UBNT equipment

and transform the abandoned parts of the city for extremely cheap and reap the
benefits both socially and financially in ten years.

If you have money to speculatively invest in real-estate -- buy everything you
can in detroit.

Then get celeb detroiters to join and help back you.

Detroit is just ripe for innovation and can become a tech hub with LOW COST
housing ASAP.

FUCKING CANNABIS is legal in MI now -- build a huge extraction lab there
easily and cheaper than ANY other state in the nation.

~~~
hinkley
I've forgotten which movie now, but there's a big scene in a blockbuster where
they destroy a building for real. The studio made a deal with the town to take
a dilapidated building, destroy it, then build the town a new building to
replace it.

When I used to watch the Walking Dead I kept thinking there was a missed
opportunity to do something similar in Detroit with any post-apocalyptic show
and some abandoned neighborhoods. Even razing the properties afterward and
paying for disposal would be an improvement in safety.

~~~
eplanit
In RoboCop, crime-ridden "Old Detroit" was to be transformed by OCP
Corporation into "Delta City"[1]. One can imagine a newer version of the
story, with OCP replaced by "The FAANG Group".

[1]
[https://robocop.fandom.com/wiki/Delta_City](https://robocop.fandom.com/wiki/Delta_City)

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ggm
A lot of 1960s and 1970s scifi has concept of "disaster recovery zone"
lifestyle, where people go and live as they think they want, without huge
government buy-in. John Brunner, Philip Dick, Rudy Rucker. It sometimes feels
like Detroit is a semi-hemi-mandated version: You want to try and fix
dystopia? Sure. try not to kill anyone, try not to over-succeed because we
need taxes and you will become a source, but in the meantime, pick a house: we
have thousands.

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Gravityloss
I guess I don't understand - the mead for the honey has to come from
somewhere. So there must be flowers near the nests - a lot of them.

So one must also create meadows.

If they are on polluted ground (common in cities), probably the mead and thus
the honey will also contain poisons.

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robocat
Are there any dangerous substances in an urban environment that are picked up
by bees and that would end up in the honey?

~~~
whalesalad
No more than the dangerous shit that all of us are taking in constantly living
in the same environments.

~~~
egocodedinsol
I'm not sure that logic holds - swimming in the ocean isn't the same as eating
swordfish with respect to mercury, for instance.

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thirdsun
Sidenote: That Oath GDPR / data collection management popup is pretty much
unusable. I can't figure out how to make sure that tracking through their
"partners" is disabled and judging by how hard to navigate this tool is I
guess I can't rely on the assumption that all of those unnecessary, sketchy
options are opt-in.

And since I refuse to blindly accept those opaque terms Oath popups basically
have become an automated call to close the tab for me these days.

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zeeed
Fantastic. Didn’t get why the skin color was relevant though.

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rhinoceraptor
Detroit is 83% black.

~~~
OJFord
Making it even less relevant, surely?

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rhinoceraptor
I don't think so, it means this isn't just gentrification.

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apo
Two points:

1\. the color of the beekeepers' skin is irrelevant and appears to have been
an addition made by the poster

2\. "The duo bought their first vacant space on Detroit’s East Side for $340
with the help of the Detroit Land Bank Authority, an agency that works to
redevelop abandoned properties."

That is a redevelopment effort designed to get action.

Can anyone comment on how this program and zoning requirements interact?

~~~
dang
Ok, we've shortened the title. Please let's all step away from the flamebait
now.

Edit: since some people are arguing that it's an essential element of the
story, I'm happy to put it back. The issue here is trying to get the content
of the article the most interesting, substantial discussion the community can
give it. That requires minimizing the things that push discussions in nasty,
stupid directions, which we do routinely on this site all day.

~~~
fzeroracer
Really? No offense Dang but don't you think that is patently ridiculous if a
mere mention of skin color for a relatively benign story invites trolling and
racism?

Why is mentioning the fact that they're black somehow flamebait here on HN?
This is a story written by a black man, under 'Black Voices' about Black
beekeepers with their race explicitly mentioned in the title of the article.

~~~
baxtr
The question is, would they ever write a headline that starts like this:
“White Beekeepers...”?

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peterwwillis
Not when 99% of beekeepers are white, no.

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mc32
Yes and no. Yes this article is notable. But we don’t always need to
editorialize the notable.

I’m all for highlighting achievements. It makes sense to highlight the
achievements of those who for varying reasons haven’t had the opportunity.

Yet do don’t always need to do it of course. When you do it’s detrimental to
the people you’re trying to highlight.

“Oh, look, Johnny did his homework today, everyone give Johnny a hand”. I’m
exaggerating for effect but that’s an undercurrent.

~~~
peterwwillis
I agree that it depends on the circumstance. Particularly, it feels more like
patronizing if we highlight an accomplishment for a particular reason that the
party in question finds embarrassing. Maybe Johnny doesn't want to be
applauded for doing his homework. But if he doesn't mind, then there is no
harm to Johnny.

But there may be another, unintentional harm: the harm to the ego of everyone
who isn't Johnny. They may feel hurt that their own accomplishments weren't
highlighted. They may even try to defend this hurt feeling, by saying
something like "So? We did our homework too. Johnny's not special. Don't you
care about us?" But the point of the accolade was never to down-play everyone
else's achievements; it was merely to recognize Johnny's. But the ego gets in
the way, and prevents us from letting someone else have the spotlight. We see
ourselves as smaller when our peers are raised higher than us, and this makes
us defensive.

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abc_lisper
Article from 2018

~~~
dang
Good catch! Added.

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michaelvoz
1) Disappointing HN thread - all about race and little about article?

2) Disappointing article. No depth at all. How is the money spent? How many
bees are there? Where does one get bees? Are there flowers around for the
bees? How did this person get into beekeeping? Why beekeeping and not, say, an
organic garden?

3) Disappointing site - tons of flashing banners and ads everywhere.

What sounds like an awesome, uplifting story that may be replicate-able across
the country was turned into an overall disappointing puff piece.

~~~
aphroz
I had the same thought, I read the article to see if that was a thing, like
black hat hackers. Turns out in the US, they find amazing that black people
can be beekeeepers like white people. And yes, I checked who wrote the
article, but it is probably a way of thinking that is shared nationwide.

~~~
michaelvoz
Right? People raise bees. The people may be black. They may be white. They may
be yellow. Or Brown. The people might me muslim, or jewish, or atheist. The
bees don't care, and neither do I. I have no idea why it matters.

