Originally Posted by
ghettopalmetto
Detroit was still growing--AS A WHOLE--in the 1940s, but people were already leaving the City for the suburbs by that point. Why is that? Well, I think VA loans for returning GIs--in which only brand-new housing qualified-- might have played a role. You can see this in the current housing stock in the inner-ring suburbs. You make it sound as if no one at all left the city limits until 1956, when suddenly crime and bad schools showed up out of a dark alley.
But here is where you contradict yourself: Previously, you claimed that people moved out of Detroit due to crime, bad schools, poor services, and high taxes. You yourself state that people began to leave as early as the 1950s due to new plants in the suburbs [[We'll ignore Ford Rouge for the sake of argument). Then in the 1960s, people apparently "wanted something different" [[Which survey are you citing, by the way?). And on and on. In other words, you have a new excuse for each decade. But you're only scratching the surface.
Crime, high taxes, bad schools, and poor services are symptoms of something very systematic and dysfunctional. You haven't even attempted to discern where that dysfunction originated, aside from something superficial and unsubstantiated as "People wanted something different". Well, WHY did they want something different? Did everyone's desires change overnight on a whim? Or were there documentable economic forces at work?