Detroit's Bankruptcy Was Inevitable, Though It's Tempting to Think Otherwise

Conor Friedersdorf points out on The Atlantic this morning that Detroit has been in trouble for half a century, with an entire city's once-booming economy teetering on a single industry (and the whims of American consumers) that some prescient people long ago realized could never sustain the place forever. As Conor quotes from one 1958 article on the city:

If you missed those 50-year-old warning signs, they've more recently been piling up at a non-stop clip. Last July, the city shut down its 311 call center, one of the most direct ways that cities provide customer service to residents. Then in March Michigan Governor Rick Snyder declared Detroit in a fiscal mess so dire that a state-appointed emergency manager had to take over for the locally elected government. This spring, as our Mark Byrnes wrote, the city began to toy with the idea of selling off its art to stave off bankruptcy, a sign of last-ditch solutions bordering on the absurd. Then earlier this month, the New York Times reported that Detroit police were taking, on average, 58 minutes to respond to 911 calls about the most serious crimes. The city had effectively ceased to operate like one.