Quote Originally Posted by TexasT View Post
Yet it was seen only to this degree in Detroit...in Houston, for example [[the city I'm most familiar with, forgive me), you had residential flight to the burbs, but downtown did not empty out the way it did in Detroit. Other major cities also maintained their downtown cores, although obviously suburbs grew to some extent. If mass exodus by corporations to the suburbs was common and cool, why didn't other downtowns die to the extent Detroit did?
'Only to this degree in Detroit'. I think it was just a matter of degree.

I think you'll find that most if not all major cities have been the relocation of many of their corporate offices to the burbs.
In the late 1990s, when Don Chen, Matt Raimi, and I were researching our book, Once There Were Greenfields, we lamented the flight of business from America’s central cities to increasingly outer suburbs and farmland. In that book we frequently turned for data to metropolitan Chicago where, for example, Ameritech had built a half-mile-long “landscraper” near O’Hare Airport far from the Loop, Motorola had set up camp in Schaumberg, and Sears had fled the iconic Sears Tower for Hoffman Estates.
[[from Grist: Suburban Corporate Campuses Going Out of Style)

Detroit also had the 'luck' of a few really big companies with early suburban presence. Ford, GM [[New Center & Tech Center). If these firms were downtown, things might have been a little better. But like a lot of things -- it wasn't one single factor. Lot of eggs in one basket [[auto), sparsely populated right after the war, rust belt, and so on.