General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: So Detroit- what went wrong? [View all]I grew up in a kind of isolated "suburb" outside Baltimore.
It suffered a decade or more of decline as the industry that sustained it slowly died. Any profits were diverted to keep the stock prices high or were union bait. After 20 years of almost no investment, when overseas imports kicked in--long before "free trade agreements"--the company was strapped. It fought with the unions to get money freed up for building a huge new plant on some of the company's unused territory. It would save some jobs by being vastly more productive at putting out massive amounts of product. It would have the same standards for quality.
The company misread the market. A couple of years later imports were ramping up with the fairly low-quality stuff that this company produced. Standards had increased so the specs for what clients wanted were much more precise. The huge, new plant couldn't keep up. It was undercut for low-mid quality stuff, it couldn't catch up for high-quality, precision stuff.
The town died. All doom and gloom. Suicides spiked. For a couple of years. The old working class mostly moved out (but not all). New people moved in. To some extent it became a bedroom community. But the location and land prices made it attractive for some entrepreneurs to move in--and there was no reason *not* to move there. It's better off now as a neighborhood than when it was maintained by a single industry. It's more diverse in many ways, better educated, and more resilient.
Detroit boomed because of one industry. That industry largely left. Nothing much replaced it. Population left, nobody new wanted to move in. Location was good. But there was no real draw and lots of reasons to avoid it.