Detroit is the Future

I'd say it’s a disgrace, but that’s too soft a word. It’s a horror. Detroit is dying. Motor City. Motown. A once great city, the hub of American manufacturing, lies in tatters, a victim of the short-sighted decision to favor capital over labor.

The Detroit Silverdome, where the Detroit Lions, Detroit Pistons and Michigan Panthers played, just sold for $583,000. It cost $55 million to build in 1975.

In today’s column by Bob Herbert, who seems to be one of the few who is putting a human face on the economic devastation in the United States, Detroit is:

[E]ndless acres of urban ruin, block after block and mile after mile of empty and rotting office buildings, storefronts, hotels, apartment buildings and private homes. It’s a scene of devastation and disintegration that stuns the mind, a major American city that still is home to 900,0000 people but which looks at times like a cross between postwar Berlin and the ruin of an ancient civilization.