Pulled this from the Freep...

I have never heard this explination before. Is it valid?
Awesomely empty

The second reason for Detroit's striking emptiness today is the quality of the city's housing stock.
Detroiters boasted for generations of having the highest percentage of homeownership of any big city. The ability for working-class families to buy their own homes -- and even to buy a fishing boat or a cottage Up North -- remained Detroit's proudest achievement throughout its Auto Century.
But vast numbers of those working-class and middle-class houses sprang up so quickly that there wasn't time or space for the painstaking construction and deliberate planning we see in, say, the neighboring Grosse Pointe communities.
Detroit, too, is a relatively humid place, nestled as it is alongside the Great Lakes, and the humidity is not kind to houses with wooden siding, especially when they don't get the upkeep they should.
Detroiters also say the city has a high water table, meaning you can dig down just a couple of feet in many places to strike water.
To be more precise, the glaciers that came through thousands of years ago left a dense layer of clay a couple of feet below the soil, so that rain and snowmelt doesn't percolate down easily. The water perches atop the surface of the clay, trapped there, so it's no surprise that wet basements are a problem throughout the city.
Combine the hasty wooden construction with a humid environment, then layer on poverty rates among the nation's worst, and the result is a city that loses many houses to decay. Metal strippers and arsonists worsen the problem many times over, but Detroit would be suffering a deteriorating housing stock even without them.
Without meaning to, civic leaders have contributed to the city's wide-open spaces by ambitiously demolishing many vacant structures in the expectation of new development, much of which never happens.


Read more: Being big led to big vacant prairies | freep.com | Detroit Free Press http://www.freep.com/article/2010091...#ixzz106spoVn2