By Bill Morris
Detroit’s comeback is not only inevitable, it’s already underway. Popular Mechanics envisions the bright future of the great American city.
The year is 2025. Detroit, the poster child of the Great Recession, is emerging as a model of urban life. The transformation could be called a miracle but for the fact that the change was wrought by the very things that first made Detroit great: innovation, industriousness, and a will to win against all odds.
The metamorphosis grew from desperation. In 2008, two of the Big Three carmakers were swirling toward the sinkhole of bankruptcy. The city’s population, which peaked at 1.85 million during the post—World War II auto boom, was approaching 700,000. Tracts of wilderness, abandoned factories, and empty houses sparked a perverse fascination with Detroit’s ruins. “This whole area really bottomed out,” William Clay “Bill” Ford Jr., Ford’s chairman and a great-grandson of the automotive company’s founder, says.
