Quote Originally Posted by Huggybear View Post
Not being a fan of these wholesale neighborhood wipeouts, I was very surprised by the report, which provided a glimpse into city thinking. I always thought the problem was caretaker leadership; reports like this put us in the minds of the city back then - and although we can debate the wisdom of decisions, the economic thinking was not as insane as we want to believe. The social justice aspect is a different story.

I'm not going to defend decisions made decades before I was born, but at the same time, I think that thinking Detroit was somehow run by idiots for fifty years is off the mark. Detroit had its own vision of the future. I don't know that in the final analysis, any renewal project in that report actually failed [[ones that were built). The real sin was that after 1967, the city seemed to have stopped trying new things.

HB
As I stated above, the planners back then knew precisely what they were doing. On that, we agree. They may not have foreseen every unintended consequence, but they knew damn well what they were doing. And yes, as you've noted, they were focused on sheer bean-counting rather than trying to improve the lot of the people of the city.

I know hindsight is always 20/20, but I believe that is so we can learn from our past mistakes. In hindsight, how has the previous strategy worked for the long run?