AHC: Save Detroit & screw the 'burbs?

It went as they expected for fifty years. Who would build a factory where they have to pay for their own railway service? Or water & sewer? In the 1950s the State Highway Dept rerouted the principle road between Indianapolis and Chicago through the middle of this industrial district. That choked the area with retail business in-between the factories, and pushed most of the smaller ones out through higher property taxes and traffic issues. The four lane road the state built circa 1955 was inadequate in less than ten years. The manufacturing slowly over three decades relocated to other areas in the county. Theres only three or four large factories still in the original area, they are all still serviced by the remnant of the Belt Line railway that served the area for over a century.

The passenger trollys were shut down by 1940. The rural areas they terminated in at 1900 are now mostly 'inner city' locations.
 
You have to destroy the car, without the car people just don't expand like they do. Even rail and air would not be enough.
 
Serving & effectively creating: they were called "streetcar suburbs" at the time.

Absolutely right, & that's a whole 'nother thread. What they're doing is suicidal in the long term... And it's not limited to California: they're tapping the Ogallala from Texas north. I have to wonder how they'll like it when the aquifer is drained dry & the entire state of Nebraska subsides.:eek::eek::eek: (I'm not kidding: see this map.)

I know exactly what you mean...

Yeah, that's the limiting size factor for my place. (That and the fact the floor beams wouldn't carry the load of shelves I really want to put on them.:openedeyewink: That's why there are basements.:openedeyewink:)


No, the small villages date from before the street cars, well before, back to the same time (1800ish) the major city was getting going. Back then more of the population seems to have been going to the city for opportunities other than staring at a mules ass for hours a day.

On a side note, I've had to reinforce the floors here in a couple places due to the weight of bookshelves. And I just carried home several more from this weekend, including a couple I've been waiting for for some time. I got the second and third volumes of the three volume series "Bloody Shambles" and a history of the KNIL airservice campaign in 1942 against the Japanese, amongst others.
 
Metro Detroiter here (western burbs). A couple of thoughts:

Cross-district busing would not have saved Detroit. Even before the oil crises and accompanying recessions (which hit southeast Michigan very hard), manufacturing jobs were disappearing from the city. Problem is, the displaced workers couldn't follow the jobs: they were stuck in a city with a declining tax base and deteriorating infrastructure. Few Detroiters were able to move to the suburbs because of de facto segregation; and even if that segregation didn't exist, not many families had accumulated enough wealth to buy a home in the suburbs.

School busing was so enormously unpopular among white voters, and ranked as the number-one issue in Michigan politics in the early 1970s. It is no coincidence that George Wallace won 51 percent of the vote in the May 1972 Democratic primary. One of the most successful political entrepreneurs of the era was L. Brooks Patterson, an attorney from Oakland County (Detroit's northwest suburbs). He first came to prominence as an attorney who represented anti-busing advocate Irene McCabe. Patterson, who is still an elected official, has made a career of bashing Detroit.

Cross-district busing would have jump-started the movement toward vouchers, charter schools, and schools of choice (which allow students to attend school outside the district in which they live). Michigan might have seen a proliferation of private academies, such as those in the South. It also would have accelerated white flight to more distant suburbs and the exurbs. Aside from the lakes north and northwest of Detroit, there are no natural barriers to development, and local officials in suburban and exurban communities are known for rolling out the red carpet for developers.
 
Problem is, the displaced workers couldn't follow the jobs: they were stuck in a city with a declining tax base and deteriorating infrastructure. Few Detroiters were able to move to the suburbs because of de facto segregation; and even if that segregation didn't exist, not many families had accumulated enough wealth to buy a home in the suburbs.
...

I remember back in the 1980s Texans remarking on all the "Black Platers" (Michgan car tags) driving to work around Houston ect... A lot of the migrants kept their out of state car tags and did not put down roots. When the next oil bust hit they drifted back north again, westward.
 
Busing was hardly the issue with Detroit, decades of incompetent and corrupt leadership, rampant crime, and over dependence on a single industry that failed to adapt to overseas competition doomed the Motor City.
 
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