Quote Originally Posted by Detroitnerd View Post
If you're curious, here's the laundry list of what caused and hastened Detroit's decline, from an urban sociology perspective.

1) Never consolidated its many cities into one supercity.
2) Never had natural growth boundaries [[or instituted artificial ones)
3) Psychological attitude that cars are best for moving everything; only other alternative is air transportation
4) Eisenhower's highway act
5) Detroit converting its streetcars to buses
5) G.I. Bill subsidizes move to the suburbs for whites
6) Industrial dispersal policies mean moving factories outside city to suburbs
7) As the city becomes blacker and poorer, insurance industries redline Detroit
8) Established home-building, road-building and real estate lobbies' impact on local political decisions.
9) City leadership eager to cater to exigencies of short-sighted business community at expense of residents.
10) To stay in power, elected officials play race cards.
11) Demolish-it-and-they-will-come development "strategy."
12) People here do not know their history, and subscribe to an alternative history of the city that does not conform to facts

Off the top of me head, that's the dirty dozen.
Sounds like Chicago to me. Its much more cut up by freeways and balkanized than we are. However, they have been able to rip down buildings and replace them with new ones. No one sheds a tear about losing the old there, but then again they typically get something better to replace it with. The question is not that we have all of this because many other places do too, but of how did we get the rug pulled out from under us? Why did we not diversify when we had chances to? I can recall not too long ago when you could walk around Chicago and see banks such as Comerica, NBD, on the streets and when Marshall Fields was bought by Hudsons. Somewhere we allowed ourselves to become non competitive and die.