Is he lying?

I'm typically hard on these fly-by-night journalists who drop in for 12 hours and right a half-assed article explaining why Detroit is worse than New York, and fly out on the red eye...

But this guy went pretty in depth with what he saw over several days in the area. Granted, he did miss a lot but he also saw a lot. It is astonishing that a city of 800,000 or 900,000 resident, let alone 2,000,000 exists/existed without a transit system. It is astonishing that a core of a 5 million person region -- a core area which measures about the size of a couple major coastal cities -- has nearly rotted completely through. What's even more astonishing is that this is only now generating some semblance of urgency when the entire region should have been in panic mode decades ago...

For a city that was once among the most major of cities in the country and world, this is a pretty astonishing predicament to have ended up in such a short period of time.