Driving shrinking Detroit

The author argues in this chapter that it is not the loss of manufacturing jobs per se, but the relocation of employment, in tandem with the regions unplanned, speculation-driven housing development system, which have led to the atrophying of the City of Detroit over the last half century. The facts of shrinking Detroit are indeed dramatic. Two implications follow from these facts. First, the region has not been shrinking, only the core municipality has. This means that a process of hollowing out has been occurring, with the same number of people progressively relocating away from the core and into the fringe of the metropolitan area. Second, this hollowing out process began well before the vaunted deindustrialization of the region. Of the 20 largest metropolitan areas, metro Detroit ranks first in its dispersion of jobs away from the core. Metropolitan Detroit has indeed perfected the Fordist-style, mass production of something besides automobiles: abandoned housing and non-residential buildings.