gncxx said:
Mythopoeika said:
Is Detroit an abandoned wasteland?
How did that happen?
The failing American car industry pulled out of the city, and because pretty much all anyone did there was make cars the whole city broke down.
It's of course more complex than that. People forget that the city's boom was faster than its decline. It exploded artificially, thanks to the good wages you could make in auto factories, but pretty soon the auto companies decided they needed single-story factories, and, at the time, there wasn't enough land in Detroit to build them. That's the "reason," anyway. There was also the fact that building new factories in rural areas meant all white workers. (The UAW had integrated early on, and Detroit had also been flooded by immigrants from all over the world, including Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and migrants from the US South, many if not most of whom were Black. The UAW knew that if it didn't integrate, the auto companies could break strikes by hiring non-white workers pretty cheap.)
Racism was a huge factor in Detroit's decline, sad to say.
One of the definitive sources is Thomas J. Sugrue's book,
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.
Another factor, I think, is that with Detroit's fast boom, most residents had no roots there. They came for opportunity, and when opportunities declined or when problems arose (such as the '43 race riot [started by whites who felt their jobs were threatened] or the '67 Uprising) it was easier to leave and go elsewhere for whatever opportunities were there. Some just went to the suburbs (and now exurbs); others left the state.
Still, Detroit's a great city. It's true that it is pretty much entirely "inner city," and, if you're coming from the outside, it takes a huge cultural adjustment. But there's a thriving art scene, lots of young entrepreneurs (many of whom are moving in from elsewhere, like NYC, because they can actually make a difference in Detroit), great music as always (in every genre), festivals (such as Movement, an electronic music festival that draws people from all over the world), pretty decent sports teams, good food - new restaurants are popping up all over the place - the Riverfront (and you can fish in the Detroit River), several colleges and universities (including Wayne State University, well-known for its med school, law school, and mortuary science and education programs), the world-class Detroit Institute of Arts, many other museums, beautiful churches, and, yes, the urban gardening scene is flourishing (something that actually started in Detroit during WWI or thereabouts, when the city paid jobless people to grow crops on city-owned plots), as well as restaurants sourcing their produce from these gardens, and also a local wildflower garden/nursery. Not an exhaustive list, of course! But all of that is within city limits.
Things are improving, and will continue to improve, but I think it would be a shame if Detroit "came back" as some put it. Detroit's a great place to re-conceive what a city can be in the 21st century.
