Add new comment

Come-on, the "tax-base" (read: middle-class, educated white people) FLED the city to the suburbs in the 1950s & 1960s. Remember, Coleman Young tried to blame 'white flight' on the highway system, decades ago! The reality is that intelligent people of all races, mostly white, started to get the hell out of the city because they correctly saw where Detroit was heading. The majority of the people who were left did & do not value education. The lucky ones got union jobs, and many of those workers fled the city once they could afford to do so, as-did many of the union & non-union businesses. Detroit has been a cesspool since the early 1970s, when the residents decided it was more important for their elected officials & other city leadership to be black than to be competent, decent, educated people. Sadly, that's still the case (can you imagine the uproar if the Emergency Financial Manager was white?), and Detroiters richly deserve the situation that they are currently in (& have basically been in for at least 3 decades).