"...the nature of cities in the late 1970s seemed to be one of decline; white flight and crime, drug use, municipal default. Cleveland defaulted shortly after the midterms in 1978 when Mayor Kucinich refused to sell off the city utility; the public was shocked when the Mafia had him assassinated shortly afterwards [1], especially right on the heels of Jonestown..."
- Mario Cuomo "New York: The Crisis," PBS Newshour, 1998
"...urban decline ran rampant across America at that time, and though suburbanites and rural Americans struggled too, nothing seemed to typify the post-Vietnam, post-Panama Shock, depression-marred country like the heroin addicts laid out on sidewalks, the abandoned shells of rowhomes, fires in cars and gasoline drums at night, the graffiti and the gangs. The country was sick, but her great cities, only a quarter century earlier industrial envies of the world, were dying..."
- A Prayer for the City
"...unique in a time of decline was Detroit, which decided to forge ahead with its ambitious Metro proposals in the late 1970s despite the auto industry's struggles to compete with cheap Japanese cars. Mayor Young seemed to believe that only by "changing the game," in other words forging ahead and letting the triple crises at Ford, GM and Chrysler resolve themselves, could the city bounce back from the post-1967 paradigm. Metro lines for Woodward and Gratiot had ground broken and a line out to the airport began planning at that time too..."
- The Lazarus Effect: The Death and Resurrection of the American City
[1] The Mob really did have a hit put out on Kucinich but called it off in time