In the boom years after World War II, they had a saying about Detroit: “Every ni@@er in the city had worked a year in the auto industry. Just one year.”

That’s because the big employers, under the UAW Contract, had to make temp workers permanent after 90 days on the job. So “LeRoy” worked 89 days at General Motors, then 89 days at Ford, 89 days at Chrysler, maybe another 89 days at a big parts maker. And then he was finished.

Blacks never forgot and never forgave their treatment, and the anger exploded into urban riots in the 1960s. The seething anger continues to manifest in a “quiet riot” of drinking and drugging, street crime, and bad attitude.

Of course, the city’s white people were quick to forget how they benefitted from the favored treatment under American’s own Apartheid rules. When the blacks grew restless, waves of ‘white flight’ took them into the surrounding suburbs that were de facto segregated in schools, housing, and job opportunities. Blacks found it very very difficult to find a job or a home outside the increasingly ghettoized city.

Meanwhile state funds went to projects and programs in white jurisdictions, with always less for Detroit. Even Wayne State was punished for being surrounded by black people, while love was lavished on the U of Michigan and Michigan State.

The inner city — or was it the i@@er city? — was physically walled off and prevented from growing by its noose of bordering suburbs. Generally in America, cities able to annex along their borders could grow their tax base and thrive– see Columbus, Houston/Austin/San Antonio, Jacksonville, and Oklahoma City compared to places like Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and New Orleans, where the metro areas remain strong while the core city is weak.The sorry story is maybe worse if you look at other severely ghettoized cities like Newark and Camden, Gary or St Louis.

LBJ tried to do something serious to end poverty and official racism, but since then no President has wasted much effort on that stuff. Certainly since the “Southern Strategy” and the election of 1980, it’s often seemed that this country is being governed not from Washington, D.C. so much as from the first capital of the Confederacy, Montgomery, Alabama.

What a blanking surprise that Detroit’s inner city sank into decay.

Now some good folks want to build a light rail line linking the city’s major institutions, the downtown, the ball parks, the big museums, the university, even the Amtrak station, much on the order of Houston’s Main Street Line, the most successful urban rail project in this decade. God bless ‘em. Maybe it will work, maybe not. But as far as I can see, nobody else has a better plan to try to help.

“Should such a city even attempt to continue existing?”

Well….it’s about how you chose to live not where you live.

(Yonah Freemark is an independent researcher currently working in France on comparative urban development as part of a Gordon Grand Fellowship from Yale University, from which he graduated in May 2008 with a BA in architecture. He writes about transportation and land use issues for The Transport Politic and The Infrastructurist)

Then they will start on the other 13 corridors. Companies will base themselves here close to the light rail line growing the economy and though its gonna take years to reverse the damage here eventually the city will be revitalized. The transit is gonna be key and the diverse attitudes of the citizens and local leaders are going to be key.

Detroit can surprise you though, as mentioned it has some of the most incredible pieces of architecture in the US and just recently they built one of the best new public spaces in the US, Campus Martius Park.

While Detroit has always been low density and very suburban focused, it does have a handful of major radial streets running out of downtown (against the grid) which are ideal as major transit corridors. The proposed New Center – Downtown line hits pretty much everything of signifigance in Detroit, just about everything else outside this route is abandoned or very underutilized. This is the one route in Detroit that does really make sense.

When I went to some Tigers games, back in grad school, I could not believe the beauty of the city and its buildings. Too bad there’s a tree growing wild in the atrium, but still very beautiful. Let Detroit rot, the Big Three and all their Michigan enablers made this bed, let them lie in it.

Once the tipping point is reached, I predict that investment will flood back into the center. Even over the past few years, you were seeing a significant amount of private investment in the Midtown area. Light rail via Woodward could help enormously, if it was properly designed and integrated with better bike/ped facilities.