Detroit’s bankruptcy may balance the city budget, but it will do nada for most Detroiters. Focus on the people, not the banks.

Detroit’s high point? When about 35% of workers nationally & about 50% in Michigan were unionized.

Blaming Detroit’s problems on only Detroiters or their elected officials only is a childish view of the world, personal over structural.

Unions biggest contribution to Detroit’s problems: helping workers in 40’s to 70’s make enough $ to move to nicer homes in ‘burbs.

increasing prosperity contributed to early white flight.

Detroit was a very late-growing city: it went from being a fairly small city in 1890 to being the 4th largest city in the country by 20’s…

…so there wasn’t a significant elite. Most major investors in auto industry were on east coast, & Henry Ford purposely avoided Detroit.

After WWII auto industry immediately went back to consumer goods. Military Industrial Complex bypassed Detroit for CT/L Isle, CA, South etc.

Detroit had one of the most discriminatory housing markets in US. When blacks were finally allowed to move out of Black Bottom, real…

…estate agents devastated everyone by redlining: scared whites to sell out & flee, ripped off blacks w horrible mortgages/interest rates.

Because Detroit was so heavily Catholic, white flight happened parish by parish. 1960 my dad’s neighborhood entirely white, by 1967…

…my grandparents & the Japanese family next door were only non-African Americans on their block. Whites who left mostly gave up on the city.

Detroit never had mass transit. There was never a strong tradition of “going in to the city/downtown” like Chicago/East Coast cities.

Prosperity was part of Detroit’s undoing, combined w racism. Racial covenants were overthrown in city, but not in ‘burbs. Whites…

…helped by the best paid working class in the history of mankind could afford to move to more comfortable homes in ‘burbs, which also…

…happened to mostly have unofficial racial covenants. It’s gotten a little better in recent years, but Detroit metro region still segregated.

BY FAR the biggest problem for Detroit is de-industrialization. Poverty porn focuses on homes & public buildings, but the amount…

…of shuttered and abandoned industrial plant in Detroit is staggering. There’s probably more square miles of dormant industrial land…

…in Detroit than there is total square miles of Washington DC.

Suburbanization also wasn’t just getting away from Detroit, it was going nearer jobs; almost all post-WWII MI auto plants built in suburbs.

If you want to talk about Detroit’s problems of last 20 years, forget about white flight; that was pretty much done by 1990. Real…

…problem in Detroit in recent years is the exodus of the black working & middle class. Why stay in city w 55 minute waits for police?

If you have some money & don’t have kids to educate, life in Detroit in or near downtown prob better than it’s ever been. But life…

…almost everywhere else except a few northern neighborhoods, SW Detroit & a few other pockets is nasty, brutish & too often short.

No city/metro area in America was more scarred by a riot than Detroit after the 1967 riot. Blacks remember the heavily Alabamian…

…& rabidly racist police force. Whites remember the devastation to wide swaths of the city. Both memories were correct, but made it hard…

…for people who were adults at the time to not talk past each other for the next 40 years.