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Article on Detroit filled with inaccuracies [View all]
it's from 2011, but I just spotted it in a waiting room.
http://www.onearth.org/article/motown-revival
That hollowing out has been imprinted on the cityscape, but for the people of Detroit, the release of the 2010 U.S. Census figures in March was an event anticipated with deep anxiety, exacerbated by rampant speculation in the news media. Given the state of the economy, particularly the collapse of the American automotive industry, few expected good news about the city’s fortunes, but the official numbers were starker than even the most dismal prognosticators had imagined: just 713,000 people lived within the city limits. Only Katrina-wrecked New Orleans had seen such a sharp decline. Detroit’s population has fallen to a level not seen since 1910, four years before Henry Ford drew an army of workers to his Model T assembly line with the promise of five dollars for a day’s labor. With Detroit’s economy now in shambles, nobody seriously believes that those people will return, and at the current rate of exodus the population will fall an additional 40 percent by 2030.
The effect on the city’s physical landscape has been profound. Detroit occupies 139 square miles, and its infrastructure was built for a population, and a tax base, more than double its current size. All told, almost 20 square miles of Detroit’s land area -- nearly the size of the entire city of San Francisco -- has been abandoned, leaving a vast patchwork of blight spread across the cityscape. It is difficult to provide even basic services like police, fire, water, and sanitation to a population spread so thin.
The effect on the city’s physical landscape has been profound. Detroit occupies 139 square miles, and its infrastructure was built for a population, and a tax base, more than double its current size. All told, almost 20 square miles of Detroit’s land area -- nearly the size of the entire city of San Francisco -- has been abandoned, leaving a vast patchwork of blight spread across the cityscape. It is difficult to provide even basic services like police, fire, water, and sanitation to a population spread so thin.
As all San Franciscans know, The City is "49 square miles completely surrounded by reality".
(actually closer to 47 1/2, but it is seven miles across and seven up and down)
And let's check those density calculations, shall we? 713,000 people spread out over 139 square miles equals 5129.5 people per square mile. That's slightly above the accepted standard of 5000 per square mile for an urbanized are.
This post comes to you from San Jose. We have a larger population, 984,000, but an even larger area of 180 square miles. That works out to 5359 per square mile. So not only are the two cities rivals in the NHL's Western Conference
, they're similar in terms of density. Yet San Jose has no problems "providing even basic services like police, fire, water, and sanitation to a population spread so thin". (or wouldn't if our DINO mayor weren't so hell-bent on busting the public employee unions 
)
The real issue is tax base. San Jose has companies like Adobe, eBay, Cisco, and the West Coast HQ of IBM. Detroit wouldn't even have GM if it hadn't been for the bailout. And how many people does it actually employ in Detroit underneath that shiny GM sign on the Ren Center?
The density argument is spurious. Many cities in the Sunbelt hover around 5000 per square mile. In fact, Detroit could reinvent itself as the only Northern city with room to spread out and build things like huge factories. It could, for instance, have rapid bus lines like L.A. has, which stop only at major transfer points along a route.
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