Detroit, if we are to believe just a small part of what we read and hear, is the largest disaster area of any major US city. Oh, others have had their hollowing-out problems and major losses of population, such as St Louis, but Detroit has become an urban basket case. Its finances couldn't be worse, and the social ills are just out of control.

Yet Detroit continues to tax fund sports venues. Huge swaths of its neighborhoods that were occupied and bustling not all that long ago are now urban ghost towns. Detroit can't deal with those messes, but it finds $ millions to build sports complexes. There is no rational explanation for these things. But that doesn't mean that SD has to get in the race for idiocy.

Detroit is having a resurgence and a boom downtown and in its inner cities. Like Orange County, Detroit experienced a municipal Bankruptcy. Detroit is home to some of the richest suburbs in the country. So, the press Detroit gets is terribly misleading. Detroit's City limits population peaked at 1.8 million during the post WW II boom year. A long list of complicated factors has lead to Detroit's city population declining to less that 1 million including globalization of the auto industry, some of its manufacturing and suppliers moving to the suburbs, out-state and out of the country, development of wealthy suburbs that ring the city, migration of families to other States, the list is long. Detroit's suburbs and Michigan's State population is doing quite well and has bounced back from the recession.

That said, corporate welfare for sports owners is not something that should be supported and/or encouraged. The Downtown Detroit District where the new Red Wings Hockey arena is going in is undergoing massive redevelopment. It is not far from the new Tigers baseball Stadium and the new Lions football stadium. Detroit is a very unique case where the sports venues do bring in massive amounts of high income people from the wealthy suburbs that ring the city to attend sporting events, concerts and other activities at those stadiums and then return to the quiet security of their suburban residences. Those people, very likely, would have no other reason to go into Detroit and spend their money since the suburbs all have shopping, malls, theaters and entertainment districts of their own. So, Detroit is using their sports venues to get upwardly mobile suburbanites with plenty of cash to spend to stimulate its economy. Those suburbanites may never set foot in the central city and downtown areas of Detroit and spend their money otherwise.. It is quite different than San Diego for the Chargers or the SF Bay Area for the Raiders.

SportsFan accurately portrays the astonishing difference between Detroit's ritzy and middle-class white suburbs that ring the impoverished and now mostly black inner-city. A few years ago, before a recent fashionably hip made-in-Detroit "Shinola" renaissance, Detroit was distinguished for having more vacant lots than any other major American city. And huge swaths of its main drag downtown were lined by buildings burned out by arson. Presumably this is where "redevelopment" is happening.

But I had no idea that Detroit had become home to THREE new sports stadiums financed by tax dollars. As a strategy to draw white-flight exurbanites back downtown, it makes some sense, but I wonder if the Detroit metropolitan region is financing these enterprises or if the battered people of Detroit proper are being stuck with the bill. It sounds both cynical and desperate.

Tom Gores is an example of a Michiganian who moved away to find greener pastures and opportunities. Gores is a native of Flint, Michigan that has also hit hard times with the closure of some of huge General Motors facilities in Flint, Michigan. Gores is using some of his success and wealth to try to help his home State of Michigan as have many other transplanted Michiganders that include Steve Ballmer of Microsoft and many others. Another noted person from the Inner City of Detroit when his neighborhood used to be heavily jewish, predominently white and middle class in one of Hollywoods biggest producers Jerry Bruckheimer, film and television producer whose credits include the three CSI television series, the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, and Flashdance.[9] Bruckheimer also produced Beverly Hills Cop, in which Eddie Murphy's character Axel Foley is seen wearing a "Mumford Phys Ed Dept" T-shirt. The Mumford High School that Bruckheimer attended is now in a predominantly African American neighborhood..

Mitt Romney is another prominent example. His father, George Romney, was Chairman and CEO of American Motors before it was merged with Chrysler. GR also was 3 term governor of Michigan. Mitt went to school in Massachusetts and never returned home to Michigan. Mitt's niece, Ronna Romney McDaniel, is the Chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party. Ronna Romney McDaniel has just been appointed as the new Chairperson of the Republican National Committee RNC.

Thanks to SportFan0000 for a concise history of present-day De-troit. I know a handful of proud-as-punch white Detroit natives living in comfortable San Diego exile. Whatever happened to beautiful and talented former Democratic Governor of Michigan Jennifer Granholm? She's also gone AWOL