An op-ed in the Free Press today from an urban affairs professor at Wayne State says that the true cause of Detroit's de-population is what he refers to as Metro Detroit's "housing disassembly line":

They deal only with the symptoms of Detroit's depopulation and financial problems and not its root cause, a deep-seated regional malady I call the "housing disassembly line."

The housing disassembly line is a regional process that perpetually produces an excess supply of housing. In the tri-county metro area since 1950, developers built many more dwellings -- an average of more than 10,000 a year -- than the net growth in households required. Developers built this excess supply because their new suburban subdivisions could successfully compete against the older housing stock located in less-desirable neighborhoods located in jurisdictions like Detroit.

Almost an equivalent number of dwellings were rendered redundant by this excess supply. Most were undermaintained, vacated and eventually abandoned by their owners, because they could find no occupants. They blighted the landscape until eventually demolished, leaving a vacant parcel.

Like some giant conveyor belt, each time a new house is added to the suburban fringe all older houses built on the line drop in value, and one more house -- the least valuable one in the region but typically located in Detroit -- falls off the line because it is no longer worth owning.

http://www.freep.com/article/2013032...ional-solution
I guess that if anyone is truly interested in stopping the population decline in Detroit then this would be the obvious place to start. Did Detroit Works address this at all?