Are suburbanites aware of how unattractive living in Metro-Detroit is to outsiders?

[townonenorth]

People have left Detroit for many reasons.

My grandfather, for instance, left Detroit in 1924 or so, getting a lot in what is now Dearborn and building a house on it. He could do that because he had a personal automobile, allowing him to live wherever he wanted. For a while, Detroit could solve the problem of residents who left by simply expanding its borders, but by 1929 it was stopped along all major thoroughfares by cities it could not annex.

The flight from the city accelerated in the postwar period, 1945-1965. This was when Detroit was considered a model city. Was "crime" the major reason for people moving out of Detroit to the suburbs during this time? Not really. There were lots of inducements for people, mostly white people, to move out: GI Bill, freeway construction, etc. This is a compelling story well told in Thomas Sugrue's book The Origins of the Urban Crisis.

Finally, the death knell was the 1967 riot, which was less a race riot than an uprising by black residents of disinvested neighborhoods protesting a police force that was practically an institution of white supremacy. Finally, many of the last white holdouts left.

What happens to a city when the people of means, the homeowners, the people with strong local institutions, churches, money, equity, good jobs, educations, leave a city? When it becomes a city of largely poor, uneducated, poorly socialized people? Then you start to see a lot of crime, my friend.

And so, as a kind of rationalization for abandoning the city, a whole generation of people blamed the criminals living in the city for driving out good people -- even though people had been leaving the city since they could buy a motorcar.

We talk a lot about this on this forum, townone. Feel free to ask some questions about the history, or to read Sugrue's book. You'll find that it is, as you well know, a lot more complicated.

I suppose that one person writing a book has all the insights in the world. But nothing like living the history of personal experience to drive the truth. Crime drove my parents, and I, out of Detroit. If it weren't for that, there would be a shitload more people paying taxes in the city. But keep believing your Pied Piper, DN. Believe it or not, the city empied out from the core outward due to crime. The police did nothing to help matters.

Now I'd love for you to think about something outside of your "pied piperish" zone, for a second. Explain to me how Hamtramck didn't suffer the same fate as other areas in the city, up till recently. Was it better civic governance? Better people? Or a functioning police force?