Urban Decline in Detroit
Detroit saw rapid growth in the first half of the twentieth century as the automotive capital of the world. Its rapid decline began in the 1960s. The city has lost almost half of its population since the 1950s. Detroit has become a symbol of urban decay. Abandoned buildings and overgrown vegatation on structures are pictures of the present state of Detroit. See The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit and this photo album on Flickr.
June 2nd, 2007 at 5:25 am
Downtown Detroit has been undergoing a building boom for at least the last five years, if not longer. In addition to the new construction, there are many condo conversions and lofts being claimed in formerly abandoned buildings. Those developments have proved to be extremely attractive and are helping to draw suburbanites back to the city. I wish that Trulia had chosen to highlight some of the triumphs in Detroit instead of going after the low hanging fruit story of urban decline.
June 2nd, 2007 at 5:51 am
[…] their rollout, Trulia highlighted 7 cities, and my curiosity was, of course, piqued by “Urban Decline in Detroit.” The other cities that Trulia chose to feature have experienced growth. As I wrote on the […]
June 2nd, 2007 at 9:16 am
Thanks for your comment Maureen. It’s a good point, and it’s why we enabled comments and made it easy to link to specific areas on the map - we don’t know everything!
To address the criticism in your blog post we really didn’t see it as “taking a stab at” Detroit and I’m sorry it came across that way. Perhaps we were a little hasty to show the expressiveness of the visualization without being balanced. We were just interested to show that the US wasn’t all about growth, but if we’re being balanced about the whole country (and we’re really trying) then it’s only fair we be balanced about Detroit too.
The link you made to Birmingham does illustrate the regeneration you’re talking about (though in comparison to the rapid expansion of the 50s, you’ll see why we thought Detroit was interesting for historical reasons too). I’ll see if we can feature it in a future blog post.
June 2nd, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Tom, Thanks for responding.
Actually, the link to Birmingham illustrates the strength of a suburb, not regeneration of the city. I don’t see Trulia Hindsights reflecting the growth in the city because you are not tracking condos, which is the growth area there. I just updated my blog with a new link to the suburbanization of Detroit. Call it semantics, but I prefer it to “decline.”
http://hindsight.trulia.com/map/#lat=42.419&lon=-83.154&zoom=11&mix=0.500
June 17th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Nice work! This beautifully illustrates the donut hole phenomenon where industrial cities have experienced decay as the combination of declining manufacturing, the automobile, highway systems and urban policy (lack of) have made it easy to discard the old and build new a little further out. Nothing new here - but a great illustration. I like to think of this not as Urban Decline, but rather just part of the evolution of cities. The snapshot today looks bleak for Detroit but some day the tables may quicly turn and there can be huge opportunities in places like Detroit.