>> I've been told that the suburbs immediately outside Detroit city limits are rich as Croesus.
Yup. Oakland County was once the 4th richest county in the US. Michigan leads the nation in families with second homes. Everyone around here has a second home (cottage, cabin, etc) on a lake from 1-3 hour drive away. OK, not everyone. Part of it is that there are so many lakes that they're relatively cheap. I even knew a guy who bought an entire lake - property was like 100 acres and lake was within that. This cost him less than a two bedroom place in SF.
Bloomfield is nowhere near the city limits. Its a suburb. Detroit is all about the suburban sprawl. Its total area is massive. I think we're at about 200 miles east/west 250 miles north/south.
Its gotten to the point that some suburbs are big enough to develop their own suburbs. Notable Troy, South-field, Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, Sterlining Heights.
These started out as satellite cities to Detroit, but since Detroit suburbs grew, the satellite cities suburbs grew. Its just a massive sprawl.
The thought has crossed my mind more than once that while Detroit may well pull out and survive that it will be a very long time before it leads the area again, because in the meantime a lot of the surrounding area has learned how to survive and even thrive again without Detroit qua Detroit. On a long enough timescale its geographical positioning theoretically gives it an edge (Ann Arbor will simply never have a port, for instance, Southfield can't have an international border without a lot crazier things than the collapse of Detroit happening), but that might be a while before it dominates.
