Detroit has been declared finished several times.
Detroit has declined.
Reality Services arrives looking for the governing principle behind a city that has been abandoned, rebuilt, reorganized, predicted, optimized, written off, rediscovered, and subjected to an absolutely heroic quantity of professional opinion.
The problem is that every explanation works.
Neighborhoods. Infrastructure. Memory. Immigration. Stubbornness. Logistics. Luck.
Unfortunately, they contradict one another.
Reality Services would ordinarily resolve this through a terminal review. Detroit proves unusually resistant to being terminal.
What follows is a bureaucratic expedition into a city where vacant land remembers owners, official populations include people who have not arrived yet, and the most sophisticated administrative model in the world keeps losing arguments to people who need groceries.
Eventually Reality Services produces a report in which every statement is true.
The report is also false.
Detroit would like to point out that it could have told them this before lunch.
Included free: a complete story from The Office of the Second Census, where the paperwork is older and several customers are dead.
