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Lots of cities are run by Democrats, many, maybe even most, are doing pretty well. Remember "correlation is not causation".

Rebpulican Big City Mayors are an Endangered Species".

Are Austin, Phoenix, Dallas and Houston post-Hirosshima hell holes? No. Is Portland, OR?

Best Cities to Live in the US.

Austin, TX
Omaha, NE
Boulder, CO
Boise, ID
San Francisco, CA
Charlotte, NC
Kansas City, KS
Portland, OR
San Diego, CA
Raleigh, NC

At least 1/2 of those have been controlled by Dems for a long time (Austin, San Fran, Portland, Boulder, San Diego). Even if you slightly disagree with the list none of them are anything like Detroit.

So, your thesis doesn't stand up to even casual rebuttal.

Hmm, so what could it be? What makes for a really bad city?

Here is the list Detroit heads, courtesy of Forbes:

The 10 Most Dangerous Cities in the USA:

Detroit, MI
St. Louis, MO
Oakland, CA
Memphis, TN
Birmingham, AL
Atlanta, GA
Baltimore, MD
Stocton, CA
Cleveland, OH
Buffalo, NY

Forbes made the list by ranking cities over 200,000 by the Statistics in the FBI Uniform Crime Report. Certainly, crime was one of the key factors in the fall of Detroit, and any high-crime city is going to be a very bad place to live.

Anything stick out? Anything at all? How about this:

Here is the list of the Blackest cities in America based on 2010 census data, via Wikipedia.

I have taken out cities < 200,000 people to make it match the Forbes list above:

Rank, City, Percentage Black, Number of Black Residents

1 Detroit, Michigan 82.7 590,226
2 Birmingham, Alabama 73.4 155,791
3 Baltimore, Maryland 63.7 395,781
4 Memphis, Tennessee 63.3 409,687
5 New Orleans, Louisiana 60.2 206,871
6 Baton Rouge, Louisiana 58.5 126,250
7 Montgomery, Alabama 54.5 116,524
8 Atlanta, Georgia 54.0 226,894
9 Cleveland, Ohio 53.3 211,672
10 Newark, New Jersey 52.4 145,085
11 Washington, D.C. 50.7 305,125
12 Richmond, Virginia 50.6 103,342
13 St. Louis, Missouri 49.2 157,160

Buffalo is#19, and is 38.6% black with roughly 101,000 black residents.

Hopefully, as conservatives, we can talk about difficult facts honestly and not use inaccurate generalizations in an attempt to remain PC.

The percentage of blacks in a city very closely correlates as an indicator of the likelihood that any given city will resemble Detroit as an uninhabitable high-crime hell-hole.

Mere Democratic party controlled government does not. Actually, we all sort of know this, but even on Free Republic no one really wants to come out and say it.

There is a book on the case of Detroit: Escape from Detroit:The Collapse of America's Black Metropolis