So far, the recent efforts to address Detroit's financial crisis and reshape the city -- from the consent agreement and pending emergency financial manager to the Detroit Future City plan -- all have one unfortunate feature in common.
They deal only with the symptoms of Detroit's depopulation and financial problems and not its root cause, a deep-seated regional malady I call the "housing disassembly line."
That's the opinion of George Galster, a professor of urban affairs at Wayne State University and the author of the 2012 book, "Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City."
The housing disassembly line is a regional process that perpetually produces an excess supply of housing. In the tri-county metro area since 1950, developers built many more dwellings -- an average of more than 10,000 a year -- than the net growth in households required. Developers built this excess supply because their new suburban subdivisions could successfully compete against the older housing stock located in less-desirable neighborhoods located in jurisdictions like Detroit.
