David Maraniss Quotes

You can't fight the fact that Detroit is a de-industrializing market and it isn't facing dramatic, positive transformation.

The real story of Detroit [...] can be summed up in seven words. Private enterprise built it, government destroyed it.

The civil rights movement didn't deal with the issue of political disenfranchisement in the Northern cities. It didn't deal with the issues that were happening in places like Detroit, where there was a deep process of deindustrialization going on.

There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition - what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

A lot of the factories that had been the bedrock of many small cities were being shut down, which led me to investigate what I'm calling the 'de-industrial revolution.'

I'd probably put myself in the top 1% in knowledge of blight in the city of Detroit.

I think of what's happening in Detroit as part of something that's much bigger. Most people think of the decline of the city as having to do with African-Americans and being in debt, and all the issues like crime and bad housing. But what happened is that when globalization took place, following World War II, Detroit's role as the center and the symbol of industrialization was destroyed. It wasn't because we had black citizens mainly or a black mayor; it was because the world was changing.

The Obama administration seems to be following what might be called 'the Detroit pattern increasing taxes, harassing businesses, and pandering to unions. In the short run, it got mayors re-elected. In the long-run, it reduced Detroit from a thriving city to an economic disaster area, whose population was cut in half, as its most productive citizens fled.

The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.

The city of Detroit is the living, breathing example of Hillary Clinton's failed economic agenda.

The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries.

The recession of the late 1980s was a very visible humiliation. Cities across Britain had become the victims of botched battlefield surgery - surgery that involved the ripping up of factories, the flattening of buildings, and the razing of the Victorian heritage of heavy labour.

Some people, such as the unemployed coal miners and steelworkers of the Rust Belt, have been left behind by growing prosperity.

We have the British motor industry as a role model for what happens when you try to save an industrial dinosaur. Britain was the first country to industrialise and the first to de-industrialise. We should learn from this.

Detroit's financial challenges - the decline of the American auto industry, the impact of the global economic recession, declining population, and an erosion of the municipal tax base - are key to understanding what led this great city to an inability to provide basic city services or to carry out the normal functions of a municipality.

Detroit was a bad situation for me.

I had a lot of romanticised ideas of what Detroit was like, but I didn't get there until I was 30, and it was very different than I had imagined it.

By the time I was leaving school, there were no factories. There was no industry.

I'm from Gary, Indiana, and everybody's damn near at the poverty level. It's a rough city to grow up in, and it's a modern-day ghost town.

Flint is a big, industrial city. But when I was growing up, they had the recession, lead in the water, and all this other stuff. The city was really depleted.

Gary is a really impoverished town; it's in industrial decay. There's low employment and things of that nature.

I grew up in the city of Detroit, where things were just bad.

Schools alone are not to blame for underachievement. The breakdown of the family, poverty, and decaying cities with eroding tax bases have made a good public school education nearly impossible in many parts of the country.

Baltimore and Detroit - they are solid cities.