The media is doing everything it can to avoid the obviously racial nature of Detroit's 'decline.' They put it in terms of industrial decline, the Rust Belt, etc. But the auto industry didn't really decline, it just went elsewhere. And Detroit made no serious effort to create a new economy. Compare to Pittsburgh, where the steel industry was in genuine decline. That city has made a successful transition to an IT/healthcare economy (thanks in no small part to the presence of a top research university, Carnegie-Mellon). I put the word 'decline' in quotes because it really doesn't do justice to the spectacular nature of Detroit's descent. 'Nosedive' would be more like it.
The fact is, the riots of the 1960s drove the productive, tax-paying white working and middle classes out of the city-- and amazingly quickly. Black hoodlums then proceeded to burn down vast swaths of it in their annual Devil's Night festivities. This is why there are thousands of vacant lots in this city that encompasses over 140 square miles. The houses, apartments, and other buildings that used to sit on them didn't just magically disappear one night.
The result is the Detroit of today, 'the hole in the doughnut': a vast urban wasteland surrounded by prosperous, orderly suburbs.
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