Bing to "defrag" the city.

[Detroitnerd]

UofM and Eastern Michigan were rural environments with students living in dormitories. As the universities grew in size, the construction of dorms did not keep pace with the rise in enrollments and more and more students had to live off-campus in rented housing. Wayne State was a commuter college that as it grew began to attract more and more students that wanted to live adjacent to campus.

There is some truth to what you say, but it doesn't take in the full picture. U-M's history stretches so far back that you could say that it was rural -- as was almost all of Michigan in 1837. But what's most important to note is that we are discussing the sorts of environments that foster contemporary innovations, such as the invention of Google, yes? Google was not invented in the 1840s or 1940s but in 1998, by which time the environment of Ann Arbor was not a closed campus such as Adrian or Alma are.

Also, it's important to note that Wayne State University was not at the beginning a commuter university at all. It had plenty of housing, including the old Big Mack building, and, if I remember right, it was only after World War II that it became more of a commuter university. And, actually, it is building more housing and encouraging more students to live on or near campus. When I attended WSU in the 1990s, I lived in off-campus housing in the nearby Hollenden building, as did many of my peers. So, it's a more complicated story.