Maybe Detroit could declare Chapter 9 and thereby avoid any obligation to serve, say, the one remaining house on a prairie block [[and the joke would be creating a "good Detroit" to take on all the good neighborhoods and leaving all the bad neighborhoods in the "old Detroit").

Relocation and "shrinking" are great ideas in theory, but with no eminent domain, all the city could do is cut off services. And then the city would get sued for due process and equal protection violations [["Why do rich citizens get services where poor ones do not?"). And frankly, we don't have 25 to 50 years. It's more like 3-5.

Detroit needs to go to the feds and aggressively seek [[1) a city-wide tax break until Detroit meets some benchmark of prosperity and [[2) the ability to let in a couple of hundred thousand immigrants to soak up the empty housing stock and property.