Quote:
Originally Posted by urbanlife
So from the sounds of it, wealthier people have moved outward in the city leaving poorer people within the city...sounds like a typical case for most cities in this country...so I guess it would be important for the city to refocus inward, rail leading into the city, new developments that are designed to make urban life attractive to wealthy people.
That is basically what Portland did when building its Pearl District. It was once a dead warehouse district that the city rebuilt into high end condos and now it is a clean version of an urban area. NYC did this with the construction of Battery Park City, which is urban living without all the dirtiness of urban living.
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On a simplistic level, this is exactly what happened. The Detroit area also grew a lot faster in area than it did in population, which is why there is so much abandonment in the older areas of the city.
The land area of Metro Detroit has grown by about 40-50% over the last 50 years, while the population of Metro Detroit has grown by less than 10%. At the same time, Detroit/Michigan also heavily neglected the public transportation networks that allowed the denser neighborhoods closer to the city core to exist. So not only did it become cheaper to move to outer neighborhoods, it also became more practical (especially after the private industry jobs left downtown for the suburbs).