My brother who is 54 and I [[52) often talk about when we graduated high school that if you weren't afraid to get dirty, you could find a decent paying job in the area. But even then, the writing was on the wall that those days were soon to end and that if you didn't have some kind of training or post high school education, work was not going to be easy to find.
I don't think it was any concerted effort or plan to destroy Detroit and I am skeptical of all the articles posted especially the last one. Things change. Detroit is a mess but it's not alway going to be that way.