What's larger than Detroit is the issue of American ghettos. Every city has them. Detroit's boundaries just happen to be such that the anchor city is largely coextensive with the metro's ghetto. The whole metro is still quite a viable area and much wealthier than many others. It should be clear by now that "the market" will not fix ghettos. By definition, some markets, locations, and people fail the market test. And our weak patchwork of anti-poverty programs haven't solved underlying issues either. And I suppose if you wanted to go all totalitarian, you could force everybody out, bulldoze the whole slum, but you still have poor people who need cheap housing. And wherever they go, by definition, becomes the new ghetto because nobody with the means is going to want to live there. You can't have America witghout the ghetto. The low wage jobs and the people who have them are integral parts of the nation. And you can send everybody to Harvard if you want to. All that will do is give you Harvard educated slum dwellers. On the other hand you could take radical steps to address inequality, but the political will is not even close to exisiting. And so we all live with Detroit or South Memphis or West Virginia or wherever.
Yeah I know this was from 3 years ago but wow what a great post.
