I grew up in Detroit, and it’s been going downhill my whole life, but it’s still hard to believe that once mighty GM is on the verge of bankruptcy. Actually GM was one cause of the city’s problems going back to the 1920s when they built their headquarters two miles north of the established downtown area, calling it the New Center. With Ford and Chrysler in the suburbs, downtown lacked the critical mass to survive post-WWII white flight, leading to all the abandoned skyscrapers. If all the car companies had been downtown things might have gone differently for the city’s demographics, but their hubris was such that they never saw fit to adapt to new challenges and would still have crashed and burned. The local economy was never diversified enough to rise above the auto industry’s ups and downs. It’s been all downs for a long time now. Sad.
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- alex 3-11-2009 11:56 pm