Let's change the name of Detroit to Starnesville.

This post attracted all the Michiganders in the gulch.

Progressives fundamentally changing America...

The pictures are eerily reminiscent of picture of Chernobyl after the evacuation.

In both cases the root cause is the same, choices about as bad as you can make.

That is just an example of facile thinking, shallow reaction to political labels. Most large cities have "liberal" or "progressive" governments. Yes, city hall gets in the way of business and the freedom to be in business. No, it is not the end of the world. What killed Detroit was no one thing, but a long history of a deep trend: you could get "a good job" without an education.

You could get good wages without an education by being turned into a machine among machines.

From 1900 to 1920, the population of Detroit tripled from 300,000 to one million and it doubled again by 1950. The influx from south brought ignorant white people and ignorant colored people together. The whites were often KKK pro-nazi anti-Americans, as evidenced by the Belle Isle Riot of 1943 which interrupted war production work.

Meanwhile - since 1703, Detroit having been a FRENCH city - waves of Catholic immigrants from Europe took different paths to education and community. They came to Detroit and moved to the towns that became the suburbs. The same spaces that served two waves of Irish, served Germans, Poles, and others, who became the white collar middle class of Detroit via Catholic schools right up to the University of Detroit.

The automotive industry as a collective fascist enterprise got the government to build free roads for their rubber-tired gas-powered buggies. No one built anything for Burroughs. The calculator company from St. Louis relocated to Detroit. An early model of Ford actually had a wire rack for an adding machine to serve the businessman on his (chauffeured) way to work. In addition to Burroughs, along came COMPUWARE with its "Abend Aid" as one of dozens of non-automotive technology firms in Detroit.

The larger picture is that GM in particular, but also the others (Ford less so), all pumped the city for free this and free that and dodged their attendant tax burdens for police, fire, water, and schools. More and more people flowed in and consumed a shrinking pool of resources. But that pool was being drained fastest by the automotive corporations -- which had no need for educated workers ... until it was too late....

Japan, robotics, the Deming model, .... The combined factors of production could be in Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama.... for Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, BMW... By then, it was largely too late for Detroit, short of a Brainiac Plan to re-grow three or four generations of highly-educated specialty technology production shops.

A story from World War II is that the Zeroes made entirely in the main factory were not as dependable as the ones assembled from contractor parts. Think about that...

I have worked for Kawasaki and Honda: everyone dresses alike. No one is better; no white collar or blue collar. You could be hourly or salaried, employee or contractor, but everyone was always on the same team. Detroit never thought that way.

in fact, one of the "promises" of robotics was that the engineers would just design and build production plants and not need workers at all... of course, in order to create a robotic welding cell, you need to actually know how to weld...