WASHINGTON, D.C. July 9 (DPI) – A New York Times item today on the decline of Detroit — that the city’s services now barely exist and possible bankruptcy is irrelevant to its current residents — spurred a range of comments from readers. But the general, pessimistic view was that the fall of the Motor City is simply a precursor of more urban collapses in the years ahead.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/us/financial-crisis-just-a-symptom-of-detroits-woes.html?hp

Among the comments:

Detroit is just a sneak preview of what is to come. In less than a year from now, most major US cities will go bankrupt. People will move away, industries will pull up their roots, the rich will flee to a foreign country and the rest of you will be left behind to fend for yourselves.

Also:

Deserve’? A city deserves the government it gets. Too many people in Detroit continued to vote for incompetent and corrupt officials, too many people in Detroit didn’t pay their property taxes, not enough people in Detroit took matters into their own hands to clean the streets, form street patrols, fix what they could and start little businesses. All sat back and complained and waited for ‘government’ to rescue them.

And:

Detroit’s civic services were “wiped out” by privatization and the emergency czar? That’s like saying the autopsy killed the patient.
Starting in the mid 1970s with Coleman Young and his politics of retribution and extending through the term of admitted felon Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit has been spectacularly mismanaged by one-party rule that happily agreed to impossible pension obligations while shamelessly ripping off its own constituents. That the city is now on the brink of losing control over its municipal services and finances has nothing to do with dead novelists but rather the corruption and folly by city leaders over the last four decades.

A broader view, but no less reassuring for Detroit residents:

Two hundred years ago Detroit was an outpost town of a few thousand residents. It ballooned during the early 1900s thanks to the auto industry but that bubble burst decades ago. With the jobs gone the population has moved on. Many more people used to live in Detroit because there was a *reason* for them to live there. This has been happening to cities since cities first appeared on Earth. Why should Detroit be any different? Obviously there are issues of race and class at play, but the underlying fact remains that if Detroit needs to contract by 60, 70 or 80%, then the best thing for all involved is to bite the bullet and do it as fast as possible.

Also:

I guess there may be a limit to how much a city can take of other people’s money before they leave. Now we see what happens when a city loses that balance.