It's not necessarily imprudent or inefficient. It's just a consequence of what happens when you build stuff that needs maintenance. Now, I'm not saying that some of the projects weren't unwisely extravagant, nor that the budget wasn't spent inefficiently and recklessly - but even if it was spent by angels instead of humans, this would still happen.

We can't know the future. So when you need a 5-lane road now, or a major shopping center now, and the history says you'll almost certainly need a 7-lane road and big parking garage in a few years, the prudent thing to do is to build a little more capacity than you need, with the hopes that by the time you maintain it for 20 years and it needs to be replaced or improved again, it's served its purpose well.

Detroit was a seriously happening place half a century ago. There was nothing wrong with creating the buildings, infrastructure, and signing up for the maintenance contracts that those buildings needed at the time. But there was no plan in place for "What happens if all the money disappears and most of the city flees."

Many of the roads and buildings are in surprisingly good shape. Even if they can't do a good, frequent job of plowing the snow off that 7-lane-road in the winter, they're keeping up with it well enough. Pipes, drains, and wires designed to last 20 years are holding together pretty well after 40 years. But they're going to fail eventually, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Should there be a plan, maybe an insurance contract, for demolition if the city can no longer afford a thing? Could there be?

You missed the racial fearmongering fueled by various things and the public and private sector policy that enabled that evacuation.

> the public and private sector policy that enabled that evacuation

What do you mean by "enabled"? Are you suggesting the law should force a manufacturing plant to stay in a city, or a person to stay in their apartment? How would that possibly work?

To understand why Detroit and the surrounding region look the way they do today you cannot just chalk everything up to factories closing and the mismanagement of local government. Not to say those aren't important, but the systematically racist policies on the Federal and state level (combined with private sector trends that pushed those policies), especially with regards to housing (e.g. redlining) and transportation (e.g. the freeway system and its destruction of Black neighborhoods), played a huge role in creating the problems the city and region now face.

Here's an article about my city.

http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2017/02/16/albany-redlining...

The area in red is where African Americans and poor Irish lived. No bank would write a mortgage there.

A quote from an article referenced in the link: “As federal official and leading real estate economist Homer Hoyt explained in 1939: "Usually existing residential structures deteriorate and become obsolete with the passage of time. They are occupied by successive groups of people of lower incomes and lower social standards with the result that the quality of the neighborhood declines with that of the buildings." In the eyes of Hoyt and nearly all other real estate professionals, the presence of non-white residents was prima facie evidence of neighborhood decay and the destruction of property values.”

These ideas were codified in Federal policy and residential lending standards. The legacy of those maps remains today in many places.

Like Detroit it comes down to poor leadership. I remember when Chrysler left. The city needed to go on an extreme diet because the revenue was gone. But instead leaders kept spending, borrowing and postponing the day of reckoning. When it arrived the hole was large.

I'm not sure you even need profligate spending to suffer after 50% of the population leaves.

I would generally consider spending to be profligate if you could not sustain it for a proportional reduction in population (even of an important demographic) with an equal proportional reduction in number of people served.

Or I guess the important matter would be making it so that you only have maybe a few quarters of loss before you can legally adjust services to fit within the budget.

It's really unusual for cities to shrink, let alone drastically, so rapping people on the knuckles for not planning what happens when half your population leaves is a bit disingenuous.

I don't think it's disingenuous to be thinking of how quickly you could terminate non-essential services and staff, and in what order they are cut. You can spend your size, you'd just better be able to downsize quick, whether the economic downturn is global or local, artificial or natural.

City councils seem to think they're in the business of employing people permanently, but they really shouldn't need to be concerned about that, given that the citizens are left to foot the bill, and the majority of them do not work for the local government.

Probably not, but the combination is especially dire.