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Detroit was hit very hard by the 2008 real estate collapse. Here's a blog showing pictures before and after. You can see a stretch of houses that were occupied and doing fine in say 2006 and just a bare stretch of ground five years later.

http://goobingdetroit.tumblr.com/




The city of Detroit was in a financial crisis back to at least 2004. I believe that it was the 2004 Census that put the city below 1M people, which lost them a lot of Federal dollars.


It's reasonable to look as far back as the 1970s/1980s when the net population of Wayne+Oakland counties stopped increasing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_County,_Michigan#Demograp...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_County,_Michigan#Demogr...

The decline didn't quite start then, but the drop in population is certainly one of the big contributing factors.




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