re: #45 Gus

Yeah, I used to live in New Jersey and would go by some of the cities. I was in South Jersey. Trenton was a trip. I couldn’t believe how run down and crazy it was in some places. Never saw its equal in Denver or San Francisco. It’s just amazing how we as society has allowed this to happen. The utter deterioration of communities and the families that fell in the cracks.

It’s less “fell through the cracks” than “lost their social order”. Detroit’s 1967 race riots scared many white residents into leaving the city and Detroit’s first black mayor made matters worse with a hostile policy towards non-blacks. The resultant ‘white flight’ gutted the city’s population tax base while the hammering the US auto industry took beginning in the 1970’s largely eliminated its commercial tax base. That plus the other effects of bad government made terminal decline inevitable.