re: #117 Ian G.

Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. Sprawl has to be a big one of the factors. Compare Detroit to other rust-belt cities that have lost a lot of people like Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and you see just how big it is, and just how much of it is abandoned. It’s hard to govern something like that. Cleveland and Pittsburgh have their blighted areas, but they’re much less extensive because the cities are more compact.

And Cleveland and Pittsburgh have the basis for a meds-and-eds revival (Carnegie Mellon and UP Medical Center; Case Western and the Cleveland Clinic). I don’t know if Detroit has that.

While most cities have their inner cities and their wealthier neighborhoods, Detroit is surrounded by middle and upper-class suburbs which are mostly white, and which are totally separate and autonomous from anything that goes on within Detroit city limits.