It is hard for us to think of a Great Depression as being a local sort of tumor rather than a cancer that destroys the entire body.
Detroit is become the same wasteland that the rural South too often is. Small towns with growing crime and poverty and an overpopulation of unemployed, often minorities and old people on fixed incomes. Property values march along steadily downward, business districts empty, and schools deteriorate in the carcasses of one-thriving communities.
Opportunity still exists here, but it requires going to where it endures, not holding on to what is Gone With The Wind.
As in Detroit's case, it doesn't do any good to inherit a Tara if no one can afford to farm it, or build cars there, or whatever. Mayberry has long been a rural ghetto -- now Detroit is the post-apocalyptic ruin from Escape From New York (or maybe more accurately, The Omega Man.)
No insult intended for those sticking it out in either, but it just seems a sorry end of it all, and neither case is one industry and civic planners did not see coming some decades ago.
