I know, I know... you're all rolling your eyes, waiting for the punchline. But hold on a minute! In the early 1950s, Albert Cobo pushed through an aggressive urban renewal plan that demolished "slums" [[typically defined as any black neighborhood) and ignored all pleas to build public housing projects for the displaced residents.

Though the original Detroit urban plans had called for many public housing projects, Cobo believed the public would be better served by private development, and even ran his campaign on protecting single-family [[typically white) neighborhoods from "the projects."

In a series of events that should surprise no one, private developers were reluctant to build low-income housing units/ The crowning success of Cobo's approach was Lafayette Park, a successful luxury high-rise that nonetheless did nothing to address the lack of decent low-income housing. So where did everyone from Black Bottom - where the Lafayette Towers now gleamed in the sun - go, exactly?

The short answer: everywhere. Thousands of poor blacks spilled into Detroit's neighborhoods, squeezing in wherever they could. This unsurprisingly unnerved middle class residents, and white flight/middle class flight [[as many blacks moved to in or near the inner ring suburbs as soon as it was possible) began in earnest. From 1950 to 1960, Detroit lost almost 200,000 people while racial tensions and crime increased. The city sort of hung on in the 1960s as the less socially mobile clung to their investments, but then the riots killed that. You'd like to think that the world was/is ready for mixed income neighborhoods, but the statistics often prove otherwise.

On the other hand, we have New York City and Chicago, which were much more proactive in constructing public housing. And though these projects were often hotbeds for crime and widely decried for that, it somewhat isolated the issues from the rest of the city. Both New York City and Chicago have fared much better than Detroit.

However, we've seen something interesting in New York City and Chicago in the last few decades. New York City reinvested in its public housing projects and is now the safest big city in the United States. Chicago has demolished much of its projects and has witnessed a mass exodus of its middle class black population and is grabbing headlines with its murder problem. In fact, there is a growing consensus that Chicago might be in trouble, and the South Side is basically becoming a mirror image of Detroit.

So are the projects really the villain? And how we can we relate these potential lessons to the Detroit Works' plan to decommission vast, inhabited tracts of the city?

Hmmm....