A New Detroit Needs Four Cylinders, Not Eight

It’s hardly helpful to a bankrupt Detroit to say “I told you so,” but I did tell you so. In the October 1995 issue of the Atlantic, I suggested that large Rust Belt cities such as Detroit, whose populations had declined drastically during the postwar era, needed to consider planned shrinkage. This may sound like a declaration of defeat. Yet as I wrote, “Downsizing has affected private institutions, public agencies, and the military, as well as businesses. Why not cities?”

When a city loses population, it loses residents, but keeps the same amount of infrastructure. The same streets must be policed and maintained, the same streetlights repaired, the same water and sewer systems operated, the same transit systems run. It is like an (impoverished) elderly couple having to keep up a large house after all the kids have grown up and moved out.