City Limits

A couple of years ago, I spent a week and a couple thousand dollars to holiday in Detroit — perhaps not the most obvious vacation spot. But for someone from Vancouver — where housing prices shoot straight up like rockets every few years, where there are constant arguments over what kind of growth and development should be allowed in existing neighbourhoods, and where, in spite of a robust mix of many ethnicities and races, we have the lowest Black population of any major city in the United States or Canada — Detroit is endlessly fascinating.

In 1950, it was the richest city in the U.S.— some say the world — on a per-capita income basis. Now it’s the second poorest in the country. It had 1.8 million people at one point, spread out over 370 square kilometres in mainly single-family detached homes, the product of an era when good factory jobs were plentiful. In 2020, the census counted only 639,000 in this metropolis, which is about 60 percent the geographical size of...