Can Detroit Recover?

Michigan Central Depot in Detroit.  Photo from Forgotten Detroit.

Edward Glaeser has an interesting post on Detroit:

Detroit’s triumph and tragedy may be the great story of 20th century urban America. Like all of America’s older cities, Detroit first grew along a waterway as part of the great transport network that won the West.

The city’s early entrepreneurs took advantage of the city’s location, which made it an ideal place for Hiram Walker to import Canadian whiskey into the United States and for Frank Kirby to build iron-hulled steamboats.
Cars were the natural combination of engines and carriages, and the Detroit area had both. William C. Durant, who founded General Motors, came out of the carriage business in nearby Flint, Mich. Henry Ford learned at Kirby’s Detroit Dry Dock Engine Works. Even more importantly, like Silicon Valley in the 1960s, Detroit had an abundance of entrepreneurs fighting to find the new, new thing.

Later:

Part of Ford’s genius was that he was able to provide high wage jobs for less-educated workers; this helped turn Detroit into a city with too few nonautomotive skills.
Over the last 40 years, sun, skills and small companies have been strong predictors of urban growth, but Detroit is a cold city of big companies. About 12 percent of its adults have a college degree. A city built to house almost two million people now has 911,000. While Detroit was one of the richest places on the planet in 1950, it is now synonymous with urban poverty.

This is the unfortunate legacy of the Rust Belt.  The very good paying jobs which were readily available discouraged people from going to college.  Why invest 4 or more years to get slightly higher pay, when you can walk out of high school and get a job paying $20 an hour.  Then the job only involved doing one thing day after day for years.  If a person lost that job, they didn't have other skills to fall back on.  As far as not having small businesses, I don't think that is true.  The problem is that most of the small businesses are tied to the dominant industry.  Dayton has had a history of tons of tool and die shops, but they serviced the monufacturing plants in the area, which were almost exclusively automotive plants.  When those plants closed, they lost major customers. 
Until recently, the city of Detroit suffered by itself, the immense suburbs were insulated from the city's problems, but that has started to change.  Maybe now people in the suburbs will begin to face the challenges in the city.