Detroit used to be one of the most-industrialized places on Earth, behind only Germany. Like programming or financial services today, 100 years ago it was considered a privilege to work in a manufacturing.
You can ask any economist what happened. They won't blame unions, they'll blame the proliferation of industrialized economies. America cannot compete in a world where poverty-labor outperforms America's standard-of-living.
The research is mixed, with lots of researchers directly blaming unions. This is remarkable, given being a professor is a unionized position and researchers/professors are some of the furthest-left leaning groups (famously a 2006 study showed 25% of sociologist professors identify as Marxist). I would also argue working in unions was never considered an especially big privilege (or any more than it is today). I mean it couldn't be, the Packard Plant employed over 30,000 people. That's just too many people in one city to be an exclusive, privileged job.
Cities do not fall from grace like that for no reason; Detroit and Flint fell from grace because they made it impossible to invest in the cities future. It's easy to say who cares about rideshare drivers, but if you can't operate companies in CA then people will stop founding them there, and then good engineering jobs will leave. Everyone once thought MI would be prosperous forever too
I know, it's always the workers' fault. It can't be that maybe the highly paid execs in Detroit slept on trends and instead tried to coast on big gas guzzlers. But yes, it's the workers who screwed it up with their greed.
> Cities do not fall from grace like that for no reason
I just told you the most commonly cited reason, and instead of arguing that I'm wrong, you're arguing orthogonal to my point. Detroit became less special as time went on and there was nothing that Americans could do about it - the culprit was neoliberalism. Unions or not, that is the reason why the economy could not persist.
So let me rephrase my question: barring unions or state-subsidized housing, how was the US supposed to prop-up a manufacturing economy in the 1980s?
Government policies were a part of the problem but a lot of Detroit area manufacturing companies were simply not very good at their jobs. They coasted on past success while being unresponsive to customers, and failed to improve on quality or productivity. This was primarily a management failure — only a true moron could approve production of vehicles like the Ford Granada — but the adversarial approach taken by most union leaders certainly didn't help. Union leaders were mostly corrupt and incompetent, acting to win elections and enrich themselves in ways that ultimately hurt their members.
The best thing the US government probably could have done to prop up the manufacturing economy in general would have been to spread knowledge of modern best practices, like those promoted by W. Edwards Deming. Plenty of people were willing to improve but simply hadn't been trained in how to do it. For auto manufacturing specifically, legislators and regulators could have phased in emissions and fuel economy rules more slowly to give manufacturers a few more years to react instead of forcing them to hastily modify old powertrain designs in ways that drove up costs and ruined reliability.
Very tangential: In the 1967 Disney film "The Happiest Millionaire", a character sings a song wanting to move to Detroit and get a job designing cars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tYKSzlZiUo
It such an anachronistic song.