Editing Jerome Cavanagh (section)

===1967 riots===
However, deeper problems existed under the surface. After [[World War II]], the [[automobile]] industry, requiring more lateral space than was available in a city, and desiring to avoid city taxes, decentralized its operations.  As with other cities, Detroiters were leaving Detroit for its suburbs by the thousands by 1967.  Some 22,000 residents, mostly white, moved to the suburbs in 1966 alone, following new auto plants and new housing, or using the newly constructed Interstate system to commute into Detroit.  {{citation needed|date=November 2010}}

Detroit faced serious financial trouble. Cavanagh had inherited a $28 million budget gap in 1962.{{citation needed|date=October 2018}}  To close the gap, and to pay for the new programs he wanted to implement, Cavanagh had pushed through the legislature [[income tax|income]] and [[commuter tax]]es for Detroit, but these proved unpopular with residents and businesses.

On July 23, 1967, a police attempt to break up an illegal party escalated into what would be known as the [[12th Street Riot]]. Feeling a large police presence would make things worse, Cavanagh acted slowly to stop the riots. Late Sunday afternoon, Cavanaugh and city officials met at the 10th precinct with black community leaders and neighborhood activists. When asked why it took so long to call in the guard, Cavanaugh replied "because they're all white. Were leery about that." Rioting lasted for five days, killed 43 people, left over 5,000 people homeless, and required two divisions of federal paratroopers to be put down; these would be the most destructive of the approximately 400 riots that American cities experienced in the 1960s. Cavanagh himself had to admit in July 1967, "Today we stand amidst the ashes of our hopes. We hoped against hope that what we had been doing was enough to prevent a riot. It was not enough."{{citation needed|date=November 2010}}

The view that Detroit was a “Model City" led to the belief that it might not suffer the same race-related troubles of many other cities. The riots came as a complete shock to Cavanagh. He was, moreover, procedurally limited in his ability to control the riots as it was the role of Governor George Romney to ask for federal assistance once it appeared local resources might not be sufficient. By the time the National Guard had been called in, riots had already reached a massive scale. Cavanagh believed that a prompt federal response may very well have greatly reduced the severity of the riots.<ref name = "phoo"/> Cavanagh chose not to run for reelection in 1969.<ref name = "phoo"/>