Talk:Decline of Detroit/Archive 2

Dated Scapegoats and Policy problems
This article is essentially blaming the problems of Detroit on an industry that left over 50 years ago. Think about it. In that time New Orleans has fallen and been rebuilt. As have several other US cities. All of the people in Detroit have turned over. 50 years. The real reason for Detroit's collapse has been bad fiscal management and a failure to provide even the basic services that a community requires. ie Detroit's failure was the government creating an environment where first businesses and then people don't want to live in.

5 years is a reasonable time to mourn the loss of a major industry. Possibly 10 years. Having a steady decline for 50 years is government incompetence. Let's hope that after the bankruptcy they government gets it right and starts providing the services people need with taxes they can afford. The you will see a rebirth of Detroit and an alleviation of the suffering of the people still stuck there. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.238.184.88 (talk) 15:44, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Please read WP:NOTFORUM. -- Neil N  talk to me  16:10, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
 * It is not correct that the auto industry "left" 50 years ago. I hope the article doesn't say that. Rmhermen (talk) 16:33, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
 * The auto industry section is problematic. It has a heavy emphasis on blue collar workers employed directly by the Big Three. And while discussing the move of car making to the suburbs manages to fail to mention any plant closings or job losses in the city. Ford's Rouge Plant is mentioned three times - and it isn't even in the city. (Ford hasn't built cars in Detroit proper since 1910.) This article has a few useful details that could be added. White collar workers, auto suppliers and non-Big 3 automakers (Studebaker, Packard, etc.) should be discussed when considering jobs and city revenue. Rmhermen (talk) 17:34, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

New text
Thank you very much for writing all this new material. I know it's a big job. I think it's a big improvement. I do think there are a few changes that would make it better.

Right now the new stuff looks like it was plopped down in the middle of the article. Which it was, and I'm not complaining, it wasn't your job to integrate it. But now we have these other sections that are arranged more-or-less chronologically, separate from your section which is also chronological. I was never happy with having separate sections one for auto industry, one for housing, one for riots, one for freeways, etc, because the causes of decline are all inter-related. Your new section does a good job of showing this. I feel like the new and old material should all be combined into a single chronological narrative, then separated somehow into sections, not necessarily by decades.

I'd also like to see one or two sentences from Wolff put back in.

Minor nit: many of the refs could be combined. I think there's a script that will do this. Kendall-K1 (talk) 15:20, 14 December 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm not done with all that I would like to try to do with the article. This first big effort was to see if I could end the fussing over the material on the role of the auto industry.  The auto industry played a truly outsized role in the local and national economy.  Sugrue points out that at its peak the auto industry was responsible, directly or through parts makers, dealerships, etc., for 1/6 of all the jobs in the country!  I do want to add back a bit from Wolff, at the point where I mentioned Ford's nervous, anti-union reaction to the UAW vote at River Rouge in 1941.  While Wolff places a higher weight on anti-union, anti-labor conscious effort by the companies than the mainstream, it's quite clear that such corporate thinking is a part of the overall picture.


 * I'm inclined to keep the various topical sections (most of them anyway). I would like to make them less chronological overall.  A purely chronological presentation can't capture the sense that there were a variety of interacting major factors that led to the decline of Detroit, and indeed to a specific pattern of that decline.  For example, suburbanization is an important topic, and when I get to the better material about that, it will have the side effect of showing that de facto housing segregation tended to concentrate poorer paid African-American workers in the city proper while the tax base in the suburbs increased.  The lack of diversity in the city's industrial base intensified this effect, it seems.


 * For another example, what I have on the efforts of the city to revive its auto industry base can be expanded on when I get to the history of the city's fiscal decline. One important part of that, better seen in Detroit Free Press and Detroit News material, is that the city used some of it revenues, and took on debt, in what was ultimately a mostly futile effort to revive the auto industry because the auto industry had been the driver of its glory days.


 * I know there is template of some sort that would let me name the Sugrue citations, and thus reduce their visible number. However, I don't know where that template is or how to work it.  Sounds like you don't either, but if you do, have at it.


 * As you say, improving the section on the auto industry was a major effort for me. I can't put that kind of effort in right away on the next section that I tackle.  I hope that people will be patient as we continue to improve an article which is, after all, on a pretty epic scale.  --Pechmerle (talk) 03:13, 15 December 2013 (UTC)


 * As far as blaming auto industry executives goes: Australia has also lost its auto manufacturing sector in a very similar way. Shouldn't that prove (to some extent) that the problem is not with the decisions made by those companies but indeed is due to outsourcing and other factors?  Unless there is evidence the industry made bad decisions in Australia too (and somehow didn't make bad decisions in China, India etc.). LegendLength (talk) 08:33, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

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