Detroit ca. 1940 probably had the most prosperous working class in the world at the time. Cars were accessible to the masses earlier - hence the auto-oriented development.
When working class people in most eastern cities were still living in apartments and rowhouses, their equivalents in Detroit lived in spacious SFHs with a car in the driveway.
Ironically part of the reason for Detroit's abandonment was prosperity not decline. High wages allowed working class people to move into sprawl.
Coming back to this, it’s actually an interesting preposition from the Corner Side Yard blog you previously provided.
For those looking for the Reader's Digest version of what I identify as the primary causes behind the Detroit collapse, here it is:
- Poor neighborhood identification.
- Poor housing stock.
- Neglectful inattention to the city's commercial streetscape.
- A downtown that was allowed to become weak.
Freeway expansion.
- Loss of/lack of a public transit network.
- Local government organization.
- An industrial landscape that constrained the city's core.
- Ill-timed and unfulfilled annexation policy.
The blog basically postulates that beyond economic malaise and the typical suspects, Detroit basically underwent a sustained growth period during the interwar era when automotive considerations took over from pedestrian ones in terms of urban design. This meant that entire stretches of the city were quickly built in proto-car dependent forms, in a dispersed form (SFH) and without any nodes (long linear commercial corridors), which meant that neighbourhoods lacked identities and were difficult to revitalize without a node, dissolving in a foam-like pattern as they decayed.
Similarly, the Detroit suburbs developed effectively as parallel cities to Detroit, preventing its downtown core from retaining its primate position, meaning that the downtown core was effectively relegated to ‘just another’ urban centre in the greater metro region.
Finally, an interesting point made was that the belt railway around Detroit essentially flipped into a necrotic urban girdle once deindustrialization was in full swing, formalizing the suburb-city split and preventing revitalization from the outside in (comparisons are made to Chicago’s North Shore vs its western and southern sides). Even when it was still functioning, this ring of industry created impressions of Detroit as a smoky, dirty city from all sides of approach, leaving long-lasting impressions that the best life was outside the city.
I guess in general, slower, more dispersed growth is always healthy as it prevents the entire housing stock from aging all at once- in Detroit’s case, the bill came due right 50 years later at the worst time. There of course have been comparisons made with the suburbs themselves, as a lot of the infrastructure now reaches their end-of-life replacement stage.
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