Detriot is the most perfect and most extreme example of a spiral of collapse brought on by a collapsing tax base.
It's fυcked on it's own.
I blame white flight and the race riots, as well as a very corrupt city government.
Yes, how
dare people go to someplace that think will be better for them!
Seriously tho, my father grew up in Detroit in the 30's and 40's. We happened to go past the city on a trip that took us up to Lewiston, MI in 1984 to bury his mother who had been born there and who when her husband had retired had acquired a summer home there. He was shocked by what had happened to Detroit since he had lived there. The thing I most remember is going to his old high school so that he could show me his name on a bronze wall-mounted plaque that had a list of the students there who served in WWII only to find out that it had been stolen some years earlier.
Detroit is in a vicious cycle of downsizing and you know what, it's not going to reverse itself any time soon. Any one with any sense is going to continue to move away as soon as they are able to. The slowdown in the rate of decline in the 90's has reversed itself they've lost 50,000 in the past 5 years (as many as in all of the 90's) and dropped out of the Top 10 U.S. cities by population. Already, the majority of people in Wayne County live outside Detroit. I would not be at all surprised to see Detroit down to only 500,000 by 2050. The crucial point will be when Detroit falls below 1/3 of Wayne County's population as ostensibly so that it can be in a more central location, the county government will then relocate the county seat to either Dearborn, Livonia or Wayne. It'll be a significant symbolic act, because once even the bureaucrats abandon the city the corporations will quickly follow.
