Serfdom in Detroit.

• Author: Yagelo, Katheleen A.
• Position: WE HEAR YOU - Letter to the editor

Thank you for your two excellent articles about Detroit ("The Motor City's Broken Promise," by Dean Bakopoulos, and "Fighting Back in Detroit," by Abayomi Azikiwe, September issue). It was a good place to be a kid in the 1940s and 1950s, but my parents saw the handwriting on Detroit's wall.

They sold our Detroit house in 1955 and moved to Dearborn.

I've watched Detroit erode into a pile of rubble for years. I retired from the Detroit Public Library in 1999 after thirty-three years, so my retirement is now eroding right along with the city.

The response by the city was to build grandiose, taxpayer-funded projects, beginning with the idiotically misnamed Renaissance Center (the...