Tell people that you live in New York City, and they ask which neighborhood. Tell them that you lived in Rome, and they ask how you could ever leave.

Tell them that you lived in Detroit, and they ask, “Why?”

They offer condolences. They wonder how quickly you fled. Maybe that’s especially true in my case, because Detroit stands out among the cities I’ve called home over my post-college years: New York, Rome, Detroit, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. One of these things is not like the others. One isn’t a beacon and magnet, a synonym for exciting, lucrative or at least balmy times.

That’s exactly what I loved about Detroit. And I did love Detroit, not in an electric way but in the way you love something honest and unforced, the way you love someone who doesn’t wear any masks or makeup and doesn’t insist that you do.

I was there in the early 1990s, and Detroit wasn’t in straits quite as dire as it entered earlier this month, when it became the most populous American city ever to declare bankruptcy. But it was pocked with abandoned houses, riddled with crime, rife with trouble. There was no longer a proper department store within the city limits. There were only a handful of first-run movie theaters.