ONCE A GREAT CITY – AT 9:58 A.M. ET:  When most of us were growing up, Detroit was associated with muscle – industrial muscle.  It was motor city, producing the vehicles of a teenager's dreams. 

Today, Detroit is a city in the shadows, a mess, place no one wants to be.  Michael Barone, who comes from Michigan, details the collapse of a once-great metropolis known around the world.   From the Washington Examiner:

The Census Bureau has released the county and major city population figures for my home state of Michigan, and the big news is the stunning loss of population in Detroit, as this Wall Street Journal article indicates.

The April 1, 2010 figure for Detroit was 713,777 -- down from 951,270 in 2000. That’s a population loss of 25% in a single decade, substantially greater than for any other city in this period except hurricane-devastated New Orleans, whose percentage population loss of 29% was not all that much greater.

Fully one-fifth of the housing units in Detroit are vacant, and of course many more have simply disappeared. I was in kindergarten in Detroit in April 1950, when the Census Bureau count for the city was 1,849,568. In the intervening 60 years the city’s population has declined by 1,135,791 people. The city’s population is down 61% in those years. When people ask me why I moved from being a liberal to being a conservative, my single-word answer is Detroit. The liberal policies which I hoped would make Detroit something like heaven have made it instead something more like hell.

And...

Some historic perspective: in the redistricting following the 1960 Census, four congressional districts were wholly or almost entirely within the city of Detroit. Now Detroit has just slightly more people than a single congressional district.

How pathetic.  And, of course, this all has been accompanied by the decline of the American automobile industry.  Can you imagine if GM, Ford and Chrysler had developed executives with the imagination of an Apple Computer? 

And, as Barone indicates, liberal policies destroyed Detroit.  That and high crime. 

Can Detroit come back?  I doubt it.  Where is the incentive?  Where is the vision?

There is no guarantee that cities survive.  New York City, which once was a vibrant, creative metropolis, is now so expensive that it's driving out its most productive young people.  New York State loses more people each year than any other state.

The future of America, I suspect, lies outside the traditional centers.  Much will depend on how well cities and states are run, an enormous opportunity for sane governors like Mitch Daniels in Indiana and Chris Christie in New Jersey.  The question is whether sanity will prevail, or old-style liberalism, where productive people write the checks, and unproductive people cash them.

March 24, 2011