The Motor City: Prototype for Urban Failure

American Thinker ^ | 7 May, 2025 | John Perry

[MtnClimber]

Every failing city in America follows the old Detroit playbook.

The only thing better than learning from your own mistakes is learning from someone else’s. Unfortunately, today’s urban leaders haven’t been paying attention. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, New York, and other cities could have avoided their current dire conditions if only they had heeded the lessons of Detroit.

In 1950 the Motor City was home to nearly two million people and built half the cars in the world. Today two-thirds of those people are gone and its auto industry is a shell of its former self. After decades of decline, Detroit is on the way back with a new can-do attitude. But its troubled history gives today’s urban leaders a master class in how not to govern.

Leaders who make the same choices today that Detroit made starting sixty-five years ago have a 100% chance of seeing the same failure. The proof is in today’s headlines.

Detroit’s path shows that urban success depends on four factors, which all of today’s failed cities have fumbled. Conversely, all successful cities -- Houston, Phoenix, and Charlotte, for example -- take a different tack and have the growth and prosperity to prove it.

Lesson #1: Protect your people. If law-abiding taxpayers don’t feel safe, they head for the exits. Citizens rightly expect to be insulated from harm, for criminals to be arrested, and for convicted wrongdoers to be punished. San Francisco and other failed cities have turned justice on its head, normalizing criminal behavior and refusing to keep bad actors off the street.

Lesson #2: Provide good schools. Families with school-age children are the backbone of a livable city. Parents have to feel their children are getting a quality education. Today Chicago has some of the poorest performing students in the country.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Society
KEYWORDS: americanthinker; autoindustryfailed; detroit; ecoterrorism; ecoterrorists; freetrade; globalwarminghoax; greennewdeal; johnperry; michigan; opec; uniongoons; willowrun

[MtnClimber]

Why would urban leaders want someone else to prosper?

[sauropod]

bkmk

[Fiji Hill]

The Motor City--The Satintones (1960)

[chajin]

Difficult as the 1967 riots were for the Motor City, key facts were hidden by leaders pushing their own narrative. Far from being angry and despairing, black families in Detroit that summer earned 95% of white income and enjoyed an unemployment rate lower than the national rate for whites. Groundbreaking black reporters including Louis Lomax, the first African-American TV journalist with a national following, and Sandra West, a UPI reporter who lived in the riot zone, wrote that the destruction was instigated by professional out-of-town operatives. Blacks and whites set fires together, watched stores burn together, went to jail together. The first sniper arrested by police was white. Congressman John Conyers tried to calm the situation, telling his fellow black residents to stop looting and go home, and had his office torched for his trouble.

These are not the characteristics of a race riot. Yet history has been hijacked to paint a picture very different from reality. So, instead of being guided by the truth of the past, cities are subject to being driven into a ditch by revisionism and heresy.

Sounds like the "mostly peaceful" astroturf riots of 2020, and the astroturf protests of 2024. To the left, the issue is always the revolution. Detroit, if it returns to success, will do so because its people will care more about their hometown than the revolution--i.e., making Detroit great again.

[dfwgator]

Motor City Is Burning - MC5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ly5pYEww9A

[Worldtraveler once upon a time]

From the article ---

"You can't learn from mistakes if you cover them up. City leaders will do whatever they can to pass the buck and blame their problems on the economy, the Federal government, past administrations, or anything except their own short-sightedness and lack of resolve. "

In a nutshell, this has been the Democrats' and some RINOs' playbook.

Our electorate has been fooled many times by "I'm not the other guy" campaign tactics.

[Vaduz]

100% chance of failure for any city or state ran by democrats it’s not by accident the main feed line for failure is kickbacks and stupidity and they own them.

The party has opted to bypass the small money gig and went to the top BIDEN WINS ELECTION and look what happened to the country fail.

If you keep touching fire the burns get worse.

[MacNaughton]

... Detroit, if it returns to success, will do so because its people will care more about their hometown than the revolution--i.e., making Detroit great again.

It will be very interesting to see where Detroit ends up with that dominant Muslim population in nearby Dearborn.

[ridesthemiles]

IN CLEARLY REMEMBER WHEN DETROIT WOULD SELL ANY ABANDONED RUN DOWN PROPERTY TO A PERSON FOR $1 IF THEY WOULD RESTORE IT AND MAKE IT LIVABLE.

THIS OLD HOUSE DID A COUPLE OF EPISODES ON THE TOPIC

[rhinohunter]

Today two-thirds of those people are gone

But they all still vote dem...

[T.B. Yoits]

Detroit was doomed the day it was founded. It's an inland port and the St. Lawrence River is too small for the size of ships that launched in the 1950s, which have been surpassed by even larger ships since then.

Portland, Oregon is the most recent U.S. city (2015) to suffer the same fate.

[DownInFlames]

This all goes back to LBJ and his great society. Dump Trillions on blacks and you will have those ni$$$ers voting Democrat for the next 150 years.

[Jacquerie]

<>Detroit was doomed the day it was founded.<>

Gosh, that is an ignorant comment.

[T.B. Yoits]

Gosh, that is an ignorant comment.

...and yet, here we are.