Quote Originally Posted by 313WX View Post
Detroit will probably be the last place this "death of the fringe suburbs" takes place, considering we're still building infrastructure towards Flint and Port Huron because people can't fathom being even 30 miles or closer to Detroit proper.

If anything, I would expect the folks in the fringe suburbs will either build up their own little cities versus returning back to the center [[see Southfield and Troy) or, if worse comes to worse, move to an already established city.

Either way, it probably won't work in Detroit's favor as much as we would like.
I think it will go more like this: if the country is indeed going through a paradigm shift and Metro Detroit does not keep pace then it can be expected that the metro area will continue to decline.

Metro Detroit has squeezed just about every bit of economic prosperity that it's ever gonna get out of suburbs. Suburbs probably will probably not foster any more new economic activity for the region for quite some time [[if ever). And all of the economic activity that an urban environment would generate for the region completely misses Metro Detroit because the urban areas are so decimated.