Quote Originally Posted by townonenorth View Post
There is nothing worse than oversimplifying a situation, but I will try anyway.

Detroit's whole problem has been crime. From the starting shot of urban flight to the present day, crime has been the leading cause of flight out of the city.
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.