by Tanada » Tue 26 May 2015, 10:24:30
I would take issue with 0 percent for Detroit. The vast area of the city is made up of neighborhoods filled with tract houses dating from 1900-1970. Almost all of those neighborhoods are subdivisions that simply follow the city street grid pattern instead of the cul-de-sac happy curvy private subdivisions built post 1970 all over America. If you are driving in any of the surrounding suburbs of Detroit and point your car towards the heart of the city you know when you have entered the city limits by the sudden decrease in street surface quality and the rapidly expanding number of empty lots and abandoned housing. There are scores of blocks of residential neighborhoods surrounding Detroit that for all appearances were suburbs 40 years ago.
Two things killed Detroit, the I-75 and US-23 expressways were built and cross connected with I-275, I-94 and I-96. This fast road access allowed people to build just outside the city limits on all sides to escape the high taxes in the city while keeping their city jobs. The other thing that killed Detroit was taxes spent in very unintelligent ways. Instead of being used to improve city facilities that would make people want to live there the taxes were spent in a notoriously corrupt fashion to build a new and several times expanded International Airport and to resurface those freeways that made travel away from the city so easy. I-75 has been resurfaced so many times in my lifetime I lost count, while at the same time surface streets and bridges have fallen into very poor condition.
It wasn't 'white flight' that killed Detroit, it was mass flight. As a percentage of population just as many non-white private home owners moved away as white. The urban core who barely get by didn't leave and that skews the statistics a great deal.
I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.