Blighted by poverty and home to a chronically ailing car industry, Detroit could be the most maligned place in the US. Although the outlook for Detroit was not that bad either. The first half of the last century was pretty good for the city: after Henry Ford built the first car assembly line there in 1913, it became the center of the global automobile industry. But from the 1950s on, the city started losing its inhabitants, mainly to the suburbs. With a population that has fallen by half since then, Detroit is declining faster than anywhere else in America. Through the years, communities within the city continued falling apart. The economical downfall of the mono-industry of producing cars, a shrinking tax payer base and political corruption, made the city apparently incapable stopping the decay. Author Thomas J. Sugrue writes in his book The origins of the Urban Crisis - Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit the following sentence: "Whatever on hope remain for the city, is due to the peopleÕs persistent efforts to resist the paralyzing aftermath of poverty, racism and economical decline."