Detroit Dying

I remember stories from my grandmother about a now-vanished Detroit of streetcars and downtown department stores. I've alway held a crazy hope that my hometown will one day bounce back to some of it's former glory. Experience should have taught me otherwise--once, as a teen, I saw a man lying in the middle of Woodward Avenue downtown and I and everyone else ignored him--but like all dreams mine is irrational.

A story in today's Detroit Free Press further diminishes my dreams: Wayne county lost more residents (89,000) between 2000 and 2006 than any other county in the country except hurricane-battered Orleans parish.

Is it any wonder that houses are cheaper than new cars in Detroit?