The article doesn’t mention the one thing that really destroyed Detroit. I’m guessing that you know what that is.
OK, I’ll mention it in comment 4.
Yes, and I’ve always been fascinated by the lack of effort in “unionizing” the programmers and other professionals at high-tech firms. Obviously, a lot of factors work against it; for starters, the guys who founded Oracle, Apple, Google, Yahoo and the rest understood that a unionized workforce is nothing but trouble, so they provided wages, benefits and perks that were far beyond anything a union could extract from the company.
Secondly, the workers understood that they were far better off without a union, so any attempt at organizing a software engineers local would be laughed into oblivion. But there are still clerical and services employees at many of those firms who would (appear) to be prime candidates for a union.
So why isn’t the AFL-CIO pounding on the door at Apple, demanding the right to organize the downtrodden in the high tech world? Take a look at where Barack Obama got a lot of his campaign donations; it came from the same Silicon Valley enclaves that donate generously to Democratic candidates every election cycle. And in return, the unions stay out of Silicon Valley and other tech enclaves.
But it won’t be enough to keep them in California forever. As Mr. Williamson notes, tech firms are not rooted to the land the way the car companies were. Let the Dims keep raising taxes while municipal services decline and tech workers are targeted for harassment and attacks. The tech exodus from northern California will be measured in weeks and months, not years and decades.
Yes, I know that's not politically correct. Here's another one...
White repopulation = Urgan gentrification