Quote Originally Posted by crawford View Post
The fact is that every American city has a huge freeway network, yet basically none are as decentralized and emptied-out as Detroit.

It is therefore extremely odd to blame freeways as a major contributor to metro Detroit's dispersal. Why did the same thing not happen in every other city?
It did happen in every other city. Most every central city in America has lost population, and grown poorer and less white, since WWII. It happened to a greater extent in Detroit than in a lot of other places, but that doesn't mean that the construction of expressways [[and, more to the point, the shift from rail-based public transit to private automobiles as the primary means of getting around town) didn't have a decentralizing effect on every city where it occurred. The main reason Detroit hasn't recovered, IMO, is that it has the misfortune of being run by short-sighted idiots, and of being located in a region and state that are run by short-sighted idiots. The demise of the auto industry hasn't helped either, though Detroit was in trouble long before the Big Three were.