Detroit (as in the area inside its formal municipal boundaries) would be a shithole even if the car manufacturing industry had been doing wonderfully over the past few decades. It is, I repeat, just an extreme example of the sort of thing that happened to most large American cities in the latter half of the twentieth century.
In fact, Detroit is quite responsible for the sh**tification of most large American cities in a sense... having plugged the car which led to the building of massive freeways and made commuting possible. It gave inner city whites the option of living together out in the burbs. The problems got even worse with the downfall of the auto and steel industries as well as our drug policies and building styles (putting the poor all together in large housing projects)...
The decline of American cities has been solely caused by government policy and racial tension.
In fact, the city of Colorado Springs is the way it is exactly because of our government's mass subsidization of auto-culture. It was cheaper for businesses to locate where they could sprawl out. And with all that cheap land, people moved there and places like Colorado Springs have been able to maintain low taxes because they have managed to hold on to people that make decent money with high employment.
With oil prices on the rise, however, that will come to an end. Suddenly it won't be economical for people to drive 25 miles to work anymore. Property values will decline and you will see the reverse of what happened from the 1940s to the 2000s... people will move back to the denser cities where they can travel shorter distances for less money.
