I think there are several factors involved to give you a "Detroit scenario".

- You have to be overly dependent on one industry.
- That industry has to have a collapse.
- You have to have incompetent leadership over a long period of time.
- That leadership has to get to the criminal level (even casual public sector incompetence will still allow for private sector success).
- You have to have a collapse of the local educational system so that there's no intellectual capital to get new ideas.
- You have to have relative success stories elsewhere to siphon off those people who might otherwise be part of a local renaissance.

Detroit hits all of these.