If you want to see some remarkable examples of urban decay, check out this gallery of pictures of abandoned buildings in Detroit. It’s worse than I’d imagined.
If you want to see some remarkable examples of urban decay, check out this gallery of pictures of abandoned buildings in Detroit. It’s worse than I’d imagined.
I haven’t seen any real discussion of this, but has anyone wondered if part of the problem was Detroit’s scale? Unlike say, Chicago, where urban decay tended to be smaller in scale (even if say, the meat packing district was worse than the city as a whole), the problem in Detroit was that it was overbuilt by a few companies that were temporarily successful in the early-mid 20th century. (Packard, I’m looking at you). Finding someone to take over a 20,000 sq. foot factory (or demolish it and build something else on the site) is a lot easier than finding someone to take over the Packard plant (40 acres, 3.5 MILLION sq. feet).
And don’t say ‘you could take over a building or demolish one part of it’ – would YOU chose to buy/build there when you were surrounded by a decomposing factory?
I think that the reality that Detroit was a very large “company town” undoubtedly contributed to its collapse. I’d add to that unbridled greed and corruption.
However, St. Louis was not a “company town” to so great a degree and its woes are as great as Detroit’s if not greater.