Are NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia just going through a bad phase and will eventually rebound? Probably, but that doesn't mean they're not in a secular bear cycle (picture a stock market graph, jaggedly going down, with bumps up but overall, down).
According to Joel Kotkin, the major urban centers need to reinvent themselves fast. New suburbs, the kind that has its own downtowns and culture, are sprouting up. New cities are becoming major players: Nashville, Austin, Columbus, Charlotte. Small towns are seeing immigration and population growth for the first time in . . . I don't know. 75 years?
Detroit might be in the Nashville and Co. category. Its politics are Democrat, but not of the leftist gnostic sort. Detroit has seen everything hell offers and is tired of it. I hear its police chief doesn't screw around with crime and has the full support of the community. You didn't hear about BLM riots in Detroit for a reason. It's ready to roar back to the days when it was considered one of the world's great cities (c. 1950).
I'm no expert on Detroit, but I used to live there, visit frequently, and have a lot of family there. I base the above on what I see when I visit and what I hear from friends and family, plus the occasional news piece (or lack of news pieces, in the case of BLM riots).
IMHO, Detroit will never re-achieve its greatness, back when it was the fourth or fifth biggest city in America and the entire world begged it for automobile technology. The decay is simply too deep. Maybe it's possible to raze bad neighborhoods and build again, but it has far too many derelict residents that (i) are now protected by ill-advised court rulings and (ii) breed.
You can have a nice house with great shopping nearby, but it doesn't much matter when you wake up to greet the day and see someone taking his morning crap in your front yard.
