In the New Deal, those same workers forged strong unions which secured rising living standards, and when the nation entered World War II, they switched from building cars to tanks, transforming the city into ‘the Arsenal of Democracy’. In the early twentieth century, its automobile executives pioneered a new form of mass production in which workers provided a market for the goods they produced in the vast factories of Ford and General Motors. With debts of $15bn, 70,000 abandoned properties, and well over a third of its residents living below the poverty-line, the Motor City stands in stark juxtaposition to its well-heeled next door neighbour.ĭetroit’s fall is well known. This is the terrain of exclusive country clubs and private academies, where the multi-millionaire presidential candidate Mitt Romney went to school, and banks advertise openings for ‘Wealth Relationship Associates.’ Cross its southern border – the 8 Mile Road – and you enter Detroit, which yesterday became the largest ever U.S. although the county slipped somewhat in 2010, Bloomfield Hills – its most prosperous section – remains one of the most affluent half a dozen suburbs in America. Census, Oakland County, Michigan, was by one measure the fourth-wealthiest in the U.S.
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