> the public and private sector policy that enabled that evacuation
What do you mean by "enabled"? Are you suggesting the law should force a manufacturing plant to stay in a city, or a person to stay in their apartment? How would that possibly work?
To understand why Detroit and the surrounding region look the way they do today you cannot just chalk everything up to factories closing and the mismanagement of local government. Not to say those aren't important, but the systematically racist policies on the Federal and state level (combined with private sector trends that pushed those policies), especially with regards to housing (e.g. redlining) and transportation (e.g. the freeway system and its destruction of Black neighborhoods), played a huge role in creating the problems the city and region now face.
The area in red is where African Americans and poor Irish lived. No bank would write a mortgage there.
A quote from an article referenced in the link:
“As federal official and leading real estate economist Homer Hoyt explained in 1939: "Usually existing residential structures deteriorate and become obsolete with the passage of time. They are occupied by successive groups of people of lower incomes and lower social standards with the result that the quality of the neighborhood declines with that of the buildings." In the eyes of Hoyt and nearly all other real estate professionals, the presence of non-white residents was prima facie evidence of neighborhood decay and the destruction of property values.”
These ideas were codified in Federal policy and residential lending standards. The legacy of those maps remains today in many places.
