[yummyfajitas]

Detroit is a kleptocracy. The UAW will come in and demand you overpay your workers and (probably more importantly) impose work rules that prevent you from becoming more efficient. The city will tax you to death, since you will be the only source of revenue within the city limits.

Toyota had very good reasons for building their Prius factory in Mississippi rather than Detroit. It's a low tax, right to work state, with no historical tendency toward killing the golden goose.

Detroit is dead, and it's the fault of the people who live there. The only way to save Detroit is to fix the people. Good luck with that.

[_delirium]

High taxes, strong unions, etc. apply to places like Massachusetts and California as well, and they don't seem to have the same kind of troubles Detroit has.

I'd chalk most of Detroit's problems up to the post-industrial malaise that affected Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, Gary, etc. as well, i.e. cities built around industrial-age factory sectors that turned out to have their eggs in the wrong baskets for the 21st century. Factory towns in right-to-work states didn't generally weather the transition any better-- South Carolina is littered with ghost towns that were formerly supported by the textile mills, and the state's economy never really recovered from their departure (it's now the country's fourth-poorest state, worse off than Michigan).