Quote Originally Posted by DetroitPlanner View Post
I liked what he said about the early 1980's really knocking us on our butt. People seem to look at stuff like racial fears that grew out of the 1960's, but the recession of 1982 led to the closure of Hudson's, the Book, Sander's, and much of what we thought were the downtown anchors.

Without those anchors we floated away from the central city, when things did pick up again around 1985 or 1986, many of the manufacturing jobs had already left.
True. But one cannot ignore the explosion of crack cocaine use then. Entire neighborhoods were decimated, some in a matter of months, by the results of this scourge. An example on the East Side would be the Gratiot/Six Mile Rd area.