At the end of May, a task force convened by the Obama administration suggested that Detroit needs to "right-size" its housing stock. That’s a phrase often used in reference to cities that have spent decades in the midst of population decline; in Detroit’s well-documented case, it was a city built for more than 1.8 million people that’s now home to about half that number. The task force suggested the city should tear down 40,000 properties left vacant in the exodus.
It seems to me the detailed story about what happened in Clarksburg is a case study. It is unfortunate that the article never returned to its opening thought to make a real point related to Detroit (using the case study to support the point). But as someone who founded and ran a sub-forum on Cyburbia for a time and who, thus, used to talk a lot with people who enforced city codes, etc, this looked to me like a cautionary tale and a suggestion that "If things can go that wrong on such a small scale, surely we need to be concerned when something similar is being suggested by the federal government for a city the size of Detroit."