If you want to make the argument that Detroit was disadvantaged by not being able to accommodate [[without resorting to eminent domain) a dominant industry that required increasingly larger amounts of land with rail access and zoned for heavy industry on which to build newer and more modern plants, then I can agree with you.
However, I think it is ludicrous to claim that their inability to situate newer and more modern plants within the limits of a city that has no suitable locations for them constitutes a lack of civic support [[aka "disinvestment").
Using that kind of logic, this definition of "disinvestment" could also lay claim to a company's jobs located within a city's boundary that become redundant due to productivity improvements. Is there a limit to what the accusation of "disinvestment" could not include?
While we're discussing "investment", why no mention of the hundreds of millions of dollars of federal program funds that have been "invested" within the City of Detroit over the same past half-century that Detroit has been shrinking? Could that be because it's the elephant in the corner of the room that created a culture of dependency within city hall and the DWSD that weakened and destroyed the bonds between them and those that traditionally supplied the revenue that filled their coffers?
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