My father is 100 and the houses he lived in as a kid (the majority of that time on West Grand Boulevard) are all gone. All those houses and that of my great grandfather were all there in 2007. In fact the house my 5x great grandfather built in 1855 was there in the late nineties.

In Detroit the recession of 2008 was called Katrina without the water. My friends in New Orleans find that hard to believe but when you see the devastation that was wrought on entire neighborhoods you'd believe it.

This blog documents it as well as most:

http://www.goobingdetroit.com/