Originally Posted by
English
Education is my passion, but I always thought the school argument was a straw man. Most neighborhood schools in most major cities are terrible. The professional and upper classes in urban America don't send their kids to city schools. The fact that there are no good schools hasn't stopped everywhere from Manhattan to Hyde Park from gentrifying. People with means send their kids to exclusive private schools in every other major city in the North and the West, and throughout the South.
Keeping in mind everything Sugrue outlines in his opus, in my layman's opinion, the "fear of crime" hypothesis makes the most sense to me. The riots and the 1970s-early 1990s in Detroit terrified certain groups out of ever moving back. The lack of jobs and economic opportunity in the city, along with a mindset that sanctioned criminal activity as "survival of the fittest" meant that the appeal of a life of crime became a self-fulfilling prophecy for a significant minority of two generations of urban youth [[and we're working on a third!). The rest of us "urban youth" who managed to steer clear of trouble translated success in adulthood as "getting out of Detroit."
Other cities declined, but there wasn't the wholesale and widespread running and screaming one saw in Detroit. Ethnic enclaves in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and many other places held their ground. Ours packed up and resettled to points north and west. I don't just mean white flight, either -- this decade, a large section of the black middle class and aspirational working class has decamped as well, and are flooding into the suburbs or other places in the country.
What happened here is unique in American history... thus far. A commenter said that Detroit represents the final stage of post-industrial America. What comes next is anyone's guess.