More than twenty years ago, Joel Garreau observed that every American central city except Detroit had undergone a renaissance. Detroit’s problem then, and now, seem to be poor governance, something that can’t be fixed by federal subsidies.
Yet someone was bound to blame Detroit’s bankruptcy on urban sprawl, a benign settlement pattern that seems to get blamed for just about everything bad that happens. Surprisingly, perhaps, in this case the blame is cast by Paul Krugman, who claims that “job sprawl” doomed Detroit.
Krugman compares Detroit with Pittsburgh, noting that the latter has experienced a revival since 2005, while Detroit continued to spiral downward. The reason, says Krugman, is that “less than a quarter of Detroit jobs are within 10 miles of the traditional central business district, versus more than half in Pittsburgh.”
