Quote Originally Posted by EastsideAl View Post
I couldn't agree more with this. But I've often contended that, due to certain aspects of Detroit's history and boomtown settlement patterns, this may be the most 'anti-urban' urban area in the U.S. Outside of the hard core of about 200,000 people who were here back in the early 1900s [[including several of my ancestors), Detroit was a city populated mainly by rural people.
The boomtown factor is an important one to consider. The city teemed with fortune-seeking transients who had little interest in local institutions. They were here for one purpose and one purpose only … to make lots of money. When the money enabled them to, they moved to a house and a yard, either within or without the city. When the city was built up and couldn't expand farther, they often moved out of the city for that larger house and larger yard.

Of course, the America's industrial cities were never an urban planner's dream. Coupled with the automobile enabling people to live in low-density neighborhoods and federal subsidies that fueled a low-density housing boom [[with freeways and GI Bill loans), that generation dispersed over an even wider area. Once their income and energy was removed from the city, there was even less effort to reform it.

The pastoral tendency in America goes back to the 1800s and Emerson and Thoreau and on back to Jefferson. Our forefathers believed that putting capital cities in major centers of commerce would derange government in favor of business, so they put state capitol buildings in cowtowns [[Lansing) where they look out of place and robbing big cities of monumental architecture. Would they had realized that business would hold just as much sway over states' policies, while small-town prejudices and antipathies against cities would hold sway.