It was as if Detroit was hit by a perfect storm of boom-town, bust-town with all the sexy variables thrown in. What you described is a big part of it. And bein

It was as if Detroit was hit by a perfect storm of boom-town, bust-town with all the sexy variables thrown in. What you described is a big part of it. And being mostly a one-industry town was another part, in an age of rapid globalization, and with strong unions making Detroit the more expensive place to produce. Moreover, the core of Detroit was sliced up by an extremely extensive network of freeways, and in patterns where you get a fairly intense breakup of neighborhoods when you compare to other northern cities of the time who were building expressways through theirs. Detroit's postwar suburbs came calling for all of those automobile-owning middle-classers back in the D. Also, most Detroit housing was quickly-built wooden construction, which are a lot more vulnerable to breaks in maintenance. While brick buildings can wait "on inventory" much longer, much of Detroit's wooden stock was expensive to maintain, and didn't last long waiting "on inventory" to be put into re-use. Michigan suffers dramatic freeze-thaw cycles, rain/snow/ice, and loose ground that can bust-up under-maintained buildings in no time. Another, a perhaps seminal event, at least for people living in city, were the 1967 riots (which you could connect to all that redlining that went on). All through the central city. That was the "last straw" for most everyone who could leave and wanted to leave. Many people I know personally remember as a kid moving out not long after '67. And the race riots seemed to have made race relations worse in the region, in my unsubstantiated opinion.