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Comment by smashingfiasco | Hacker News Reader

Just want to point out that Detroit built itself this way through the 1950's and 1960's. At the time, urban planners thought it would be efficient and sensible design.

What ended up happening, though, is that as factories shuttered, the neighborhoods that were built around them started to collapse. The net result was pockets of localized decay, that eventually led to the entire urban area rotting as more people left. It's actually kind of stunning to see in person. (I live about 50 min South of Detroit). And oh, the riots of 1967 didn't help, either.

It's hard to imagine that happening the the metro-Bay area, but I remind myself that people once thought GM, Chrysler and Ford could never go under.

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Detroit was built as low rise slum though, density was not on the list when urban planners designed Detroit. Thus how you end up with a highly dispersed population requiring infrastructure you can't maintain and could never afford to (were it not for federal grants up front).

Lafayette, Louisiana is in a similar state, all this suburban infrastructure investment that is ultimately a giant waste: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

Some other reasons why Detroit collapsed: - Imposing a city income tax whereas neighboring suburbs did not. - Corrupt and short sighted city management - Crippling bureaucracy and union jobs in city government (as of 2012, the water department employed a horseshoer even though the had no horses--I think this position has been done away with now though) "The city pays $29,245 in salary and about $27,000 in benefits for the horseshoer position." https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/17404 - Lack of density - Flight from the city -- caused by variety of factors that include taxes and racial reasons

if your entire economy rapidly contracts then you're going to have pockets of decay regardless. Detroit also is a massively sprawling city with 138 sq miles of land vs. SF's 49 square miles of land and oakland's 55 sq miles of land.

I had a similar thought seeing all the office/luxury condo construction going up in Redwood City. Their can't be more then a handful of "large" tech companies in the immediate vicinity and what will happen when they inevitably downsize (as almost all companies do over the course of decades...)?

RWC is a great place to commute as far as Hayward, SJ near 101, or SF near Caltrain. I wouldn’t be worried about living there at all.

Factories are not the same as office buildings.

If a factory closes down, you are stuck with a specialized building that can't really be used for anything else.

If a company in an office building closes down, you can pretty easily replace it with either a different company, OR with simply more residential housing stock.

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