Coleman

Great piece by Steve Malanga in the WSJ that I missed.

The truth is that Detroit was a failed city long before it became insolvent, thanks to a virtual collapse of its municipal government during Young's 1974-1994 reign as mayor. A radical trade unionist who ran as an antiestablishment candidate reaching out to disenfranchised black voters, Young lacked a plan except to go to war with the city's major institutions and demand that the federal government save it with subsidies. Critics called it "tin-cup urbanism."..

Young benefited politically from his very ineffectiveness. As the economists Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer write in their study of urban ethnic politics, "The Curley Effect" (named after Boston's early 20th-century mayor James Michael Curley), as whites fled Detroit, Young's margin of electoral victory grew because his electoral base of poor blacks became a larger share of the city's population.