No, ignore Andy. Keep talking about this in here. I'm actually kinda interested and looked up the Detroit Riot as I didn't know that.
If you look at the satellite views of Detroit you'll see some like "gaps" of concrete/overgrown and maybe one or two houses. Some of these were factories that got torn down or whatever. But there's a lot of parts that were burned or wrecked during the riots where they just pushed the rubble out and it's sat barren. With the buildings nearby abandoned. Mostly on the northwest side I think. East of Hamtramck and sorta southwest of Highland Park. IIRC, that area was the epicenter of the riots.
http://www.theseekerbooks.com/detroit/DetroitRiot.html
These are 2010, 2013-14 pictures.
There's large buildings downtown abandoned and the infamous Michigan Central Depot. But that doesn't really have anything to do with the riots and just looks cool.
Black Bottom was a very prosperous black neighborhood down near the river that got paved over to build the Interstate Highway system over top of.
Sooner or later a lot of these cities are going to explode though, it's just that Detroit happened to be first.
Oh yeah, Detroit just had everything bad lining up at once to just batter it. San Francisco is one that seems to be heading in wildly different and amusing path to possibly the same result.
Chicago's been a bit lucky in that the suburbs have actually propped the city back up. (Plus its financial importance, like New York.) Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, etc. have never had good relations with their suburbs. Though Cleveland has its primary industry back now, so it should do fine.
Pittsburgh is an interesting example, that city has somewhat diversified itself so as to avoid the Rust Belt blues to the level of its peers.
It's those damn third parties fault.
