Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history in July 2013, carrying roughly $18 billion in debt. It exited in eighteen months -- one of the fastest major municipal bankruptcies ever resolved -- and the city's bankruptcy case only finished closing out in federal court this year, 2026. In between, one businessman spent more on downtown real estate than most cities' entire annual budgets. The recovery is real. It is not evenly distributed.

The closest real precedent for AI-driven job loss isn't a labor-market model -- it's the Great Migration, when cotton mechanization helped push six million sharecroppers off Southern farms and into Northern cities. Whose job disappeared usually tracked class, not race -- except when it was policy, not the economy, doing the displacing. Newark's Central Ward still hasn't fully recovered from that difference, sixty-plus years later.

Second Baptist Church, founded in 1836 by 13 formerly enslaved people, ran an Underground Railroad station in its own basement for nearly 30 years, helping as many as 5,000 people cross into Canada. The Lions became the first NFL team to finish 0-16, and fans stayed fifteen more years anyway -- the same civic instinct running through three different centuries.