The Ruins of Detroit: Exploring the Urban Crisis in the Motor City

Abstract

Detroit has long been a city of extremes. In the first half of the twentieth century, it became modernity's great tool room, its vast industrial complex the envy of the world. Since the late 1960s it has become the nation's symbol of urban decay. How can you begin to describe a disaster the size of the nation's sixth largest city? a Newsweek reporter asked in 1976. Detroit is past its industrial prime and tumbling downhill quickly. ... At night, the city hollows out: all you can see are the taillights of the middle class, taking their spending money?and much of the city's tax base?to the suburbs. The blight left behind adds about 800 abandoned properties a month to a wasteland that already numbers thousands of vacant and vandalized homes.1 To the newcomer, Ze'ev Chafets said a decade later in Devil's Night, Detroit appears to be the victim of a sadistic aerial bombardment?houses burned and vacant,