Racial, Regional Divide Still Haunt Detroit's Progress : NPR: For many years — perhaps even decades — Detroit has been the poster child for economic malaise. Adjusting for inflation, per capita income in metro Detroit dropped more than 20 percent between 1999 and 2010.
Some analysts say regional cooperation might have helped keep Detroit above water when the car industry sank, but that entrenched divisions that pit the city against its suburbs, and blacks against whites, have hindered that.
A Deeply Entrenched Regional Divide
Jeff Horner is standing in a park bordered by a concrete wall in the city's Eight Mile Wyoming neighborhood. Horner, an urban planning lecturer at Wayne State University, says this wall is a very visible marker of Detroit's segregated history.
In the 1940s, this part of Detroit was largely African-American, Horner says. In those days, the city was growing, and white residents sought to build houses next to black neighborhoods like this one. But first, developers needed to get financing — usually secured by the Federal Housing Administration.
