Michigan natives have grown accustomed to hearing about the blight of their state's largest city. Every year, Detroit's population decreases, and memories of a once-bustling city of 2 million grow fainter. Now, the challenges Detroit has faced for decades have begun to spread across the metropolitan area. According to a report released last week by the U.S. Census Bureau, in the past three years, 33,371 young people have left for greener, more vibrant pastures, not just from Detroit, but from the entire metropolitan Detroit region. The losses are most pronounced in Detroit's suburbs. While this brain drain should come as no surprise after years of bad public policy, it will take great political courage in order to stem this crisis and rebuild a deeply troubled state.

Between 2000 and 2002, one out of every 20 people between the ages of 25 and 34 left Metro Detroit. Oakland County alone has lost almost 12,000 of these young people. Many college graduates do not view Metro Detroit as a desirable place to begin their careers and spend the years preceding marriage and a family. The region lacks robust nightlife or a lively downtown, has inadequate mass transportation that prevents young people from travelling on the cheap and the labor market does not have many jobs for recent college graduates. All of these factors have colluded to encourage metro Detroit's youth to flee for the more welcoming environs of Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.

The reasons for the youth flight are many. The region's economic dependence on the automotive industry not only is unattractive to college graduates, but it has contributed to the state's current economic weakness. Though job loss has hit every region throughout the country, especially in the manufacturing sector, this setback has struck Metro Detroit with even less mercy. From 2000 to 2003, Michigan lost 162,000 manufacturing jobs alone, further eroding its economic base and shifting the state's fiscal outlook to full-scale crisis mode.

The lack of an effective mass transportation system has compounded the region's struggles. For one, this problem is symptomatic of a region under the control of the automotive industry - an industry that shapes the state's economy and its public policy with it tremendous political power. The transportation crisis also is a symptom of the region's central challenge: the cleavage between Detroit and its suburbs.

Because many suburbanites do not depend on the city in their day-to-day lives and rarely make it past the Eight Mile Road divide, most citizens of these suburbs have written off Detroit for the past few decades, narrowly limiting their political concerns to their suburbs instead.

What they fail to realize, however, is how interconnected the city and it suburbs truly are. In overlooking Detroit and the entire region's challenges, the suburbanites are only weakening their own communities, as the recent statistics dramatically illustrate. While many suburbanites believed that they could shelter themselves from Detroit in perpetuity, that possibility has now been revealed for the sham that it always was.

The measured steps that a series of local and Michigan politicians have proposed since the region's decline began have been unsuccessful, and the state's leaders must chart a new course of action - bold action.

The brain drain afflicting Michigan has been well documented. One of the most creative attempts to combat the problem is Gov. Jennifer Granholm's Cool Cities Initiative, a program designed to make Michigan's cities more appealing to young people and in the process stem Michigan's youth exodus. While these types of programs are well intentioned, they fail to address the fundamental problem that has stymied the development of Detroit in the post-World War II era: the fundamental divide between the city of Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. Until Michigan's politicians are willing to expend the political capital necessary to remake the relationship between the city and its suburbs, the brain drain will persist and both the suburbs and Detroit will stagger into the future. Stopgap measures like the Cool Cities Initiative are simply inadequate means for reversing the long-term structural obstacles that have stymied the region's development.