![]() ![]() The inexorable math of decline is simple: If we find we’ve built more than we can afford to maintain, it's not all going to be maintained. By running highways and stroads through the city, building far-flung bedroom communities, and demolishing historic buildings for parking lots, you thin out the tax base: the source of revenue to keep the lights on and the streets paved. The staggering population collapse and resulting dysfunction of the Motor City has specific historical, racial and economic antecedents, but the underlying fragility that made Detroit’s fall so unusually precipitous and total is a product of the Suburban Experiment approach to growth, of which Detroit was an early pioneer. ![]() We've written for years at Strong Towns that we are all Detroit. The public infrastructure is there, but the people-and tax base-are not.) The comparison earned me some irate emails from Lehigh residents- How DARE you suggest we have ANYTHING in common with Detroit?! We Are All Detroit. (Lehigh Acres is this way because only a smattering of the lots were ever built on in the first place, on a grid of streets that extends miles into featureless scrubland. In the 2016 essay, I compared the visual appearance of much of Lehigh Acres to that of Detroit, Michigan-specifically, the infamously "hollowed out" sections of Detroit where houses long abandoned have been demolished and what's left is an eerie patchwork of weed-strewn lots with one home here or there. ![]()
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