Yet by last year it had been transformed, with a revived downtown filled with jobs and pricey condominiums — one of several fading industrial cities across the U.S.

Some of the rust-belt cities are among those places hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 people in the U.S.

and which is shattering economic optimism and throwing thousands out of work in cities such as Detroit, the original Motor City.

“(Coronavirus) may have wiped 10 years of progress off Detroit in just two months,” says Amy Liu, director of the metropolitan policy programme at the Brookings Institution think-tank and an expert on Midwest cities, who says as many as half of small businesses are at risk.

COVID-19 hit Detroit just as it was trying to “reverse generations of structural racism and poverty” in mostly African-American neighbourhoods, says Ms Liu.

“(Coronavirus) may have wiped 10 years of progress off Detroit in just two months.

Experts from industry, finance, government, philanthropy and academia — who have studied the city as a model of rust-belt revival — agree that the next few months, and even years, will be financially difficult.

In April, S&P Global Ratings revised its outlook on Detroit debt to negative — making it potentially more difficult and expensive for the city to borrow — on pandemic concerns.

And many of the new start-ups that gave Detroit its unlikely rust-belt charm may never reopen even after the city ends its lockdown, most probably sometime this month.

But if the city budget goes back into deficit, Detroit will come under state financial oversight again.

“The advantage Detroit has is that we have been down this road before, there is a playbook that we have that other cities don’t,” says Wendy Lewis Jackson, managing director of the Detroit program at the Kresge Foundation, one of the city’s largest philanthropic backers.

The importance of the public-private partnership that has driven Detroit’s recovery was demonstrated within days of the pandemic outbreak when the city quickly set up a drive-through COVID-19 testing site with booking services provided by Quicken Loans, the company founded by Dan Gilbert, who is seen as the single biggest corporate driving force behind Detroit’s rebirth.

“I don’t want to minimise the impact of this (pandemic) but I look at a lot of cities around the world and I think Detroit is as well positioned as any of them,” adds Mr Scher.

“High housing prices were becoming a barrier to attracting people from other markets because cities like Indianapolis and Detroit were no longer the deal they once were,” says Aaron Renn, publisher of Heartland Intelligence, a cultural and economic newsletter about the Midwest. “You used to be able to buy a house in Detroit for $100; now it can be several hundred thousand dollars.

Many start-ups — which have had help from local foundations and government schemes during the crisis — believe they can survive. Détroit is the New Black, a trendy fashion brand on the newly resurrected main drag and also the city’s unofficial motto, says it plans to reopen once the lockdown has been lifted.

Places such as Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati in Ohio “have had really explosive growth in core neighbourhoods in the last 10-15 years . . . and some of that will come back pretty easily,” says David Stradling, an urban historian at the University of Cincinnati.

Those who started the rust-belt foodie wave “won’t lose their entrepreneurial skills or their ability to cook”, he says.

Yet many Detroiters are worried that the pandemic could reignite racial tensions between the city — where four-fifths of the population are African-American — and white working-class residents in nearby suburbs.

The pandemic has devastated municipal finances, forcing the city to draw down half of its US$100 million “rainy day fund”.

“Think of the great fire of Detroit in the 19th century,” when Detroiters formed a “bucket brigade” to carry water from the Detroit river to fight the fire which eventually destroyed the city, she says