| Thoughtful reply. >I claim that Detroit was hollowed out precisely by anti-density and pro-suburbanization practices. >When you send factories to the suburbs and then put highways straight through the neighborhoods in your city where people actually live and work, that's not densification leading to bad outcomes. It is detonating a city via discriminatory urban policy Isn't this overstating the role of policy? 1. Wage arbitrage by the Big 3 to avoid urban auto unions out to the suburbs 2. Post-WW2 economic manuf. wind-down [1] 3. Post-WW2 highway build-up enabling suburbia Looking at the things out of Detroit's hands, I don't think we should lean on policy as much because policy can't nail the factories to the ground or prevent their closure. The economic trends simply appeared much more powerful than city policy. The fate of the Detroit city limits auto cluster could have been sealed with the war end. Businesses often want to escape high costs if they can do so without giving up their operation or market share, and they were able to do just that with the MI suburbs and highways. Policy might have been able to delay the collapse if, like you promote, the city managed to encourage building housing to relieve the rent and home price pressure. However this seems nigh impossible in practice (even in NYC?) because property owners are politically connected and generally do not like values to go down, a classic case of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs [2]. [1] https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/chicago-fed-letter/2... [2] https://1889institute.org/the-problem-of-diffuse-costs-and-c... |