It isn't just Detroit...

Quotes from William Least Heat-Moon's latest, Roads to Quoz; an American Mosey. For the record, he was not discussing Michigan in these.

"We walked in the town center, near the courthouse. The usual uglifications following World War II had swept in and pillaged the historical facades of almost every building older than a seventeen-year cicada, and that left the place looking neither soundly established nor progressively prosperous; instead, the heart of Camden [Arkansas], as with so many other towns across America, looked exhausted here and mummified there." page 69

"The impoverished commercial buildings had a lone saving grace: there weren't many of them. But those yet standing ranged from the crumbling, collapsing, and crippled to the decaying, deteriorated, and derelict. Remodeling meant boarding up a window and painting KEEP OUT across it. Here was another wreckage of that ship of state, the U.S. American Dream, that merchantman which founders and comes to grief whenever the winds in its sails -- voracity without limits, profit without responsibility -- invariably slacken." page 133

As Craig Ferguson says, "Remind you of anyone?"

Really? Camden, Arkansas: population 11.5 thousand. Comparing it to Detroit?

There's no question that a lot of small towns and medium sized cities have suffered badly over the last half-century. Many of them have emptied out cores, few or no street-level businesses, very sluggish or dead economies, and shrinking population - particularly in areas formerly dependent on some form of industry or manufacturing.

But Detroit's suffering has really been on a scale unmatched by any other place in the country. Detroit is not Camden, AK by a long-shot, but the former 5th largest city in the country, which is what makes its decline both remarkable and one of America's biggest challenges.