Urban Destruction in Slow Motion

Bob Herbert writes about the decline and fall of the city of Detroit:

In many ways, it’s like a ghost town. It’s eerily quiet. Driving around in the
middle of the afternoon, in a city that once was among the most productive on
the planet, you see very little traffic, minimal commercial activity, hardly any
pedestrians.

What you’ll see are endless 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.

Detroit was the
arsenal of democracy in World War II and the incubator of the American middle
class. It was the city that taught mass production to the rest of the world. It
was a place that made cars, trucks and other tangible products, not derivatives.
And it was the architect of the quintessentially American idea of putting people
to work and paying them a decent wage. It’s frightening to think seriously about
what we’ve allowed to happen to this city and what is now happening to the
middle class and the American economy as a whole.