Hookers in a Grosse Pointe driveway.

That was the subject of a story in Tuesday’s Deadline Detroit by my colleague, Sandra Svoboda. She used the occasions of prostitutes soliciting her husband on their property in Grosse Pointe to ask interesting questions about the perception of problems on both sides of the city-suburban border.

Her story made me think of another way to look at Detroit and its suburbs today. I call it Detroitification – the process of suburbs taking on the characteristics of Detroit.

Not the Detroit of today. That’s extreme.

But the Detroit of about 1965. It was a time before the riot and before population loss had reached critical mass. Yet it was a time when plenty of jobs had left the city and blight was spreading slowly but relentlessly outward from the “inner city.” The city already was experiencing serious financial problems; one of the first things Mayor Jerry Cavanagh did after taking office in 1962 was to institute a city income tax.

You can find suburbs Detroitifying in many places. One morning I was getting gas at a station on Michigan Avenue, and I looked across the street at a bear-like man who slowly pushed a shopping cart filled with his belongings in front of an abandoned florist. It was winter, and the man was wearing several layers of clothing. I thought how that image reminded me of many scenes I had witnessed in Detroit. But this was Dearborn. The abandoned florist is now a storefront church.

Warren today reminds me a lot of Detroit in the 1960s and ‘70s. The ghost town-like quality of Nine Mile Road, once filled with small and medium-sized tool- and- die shops, symbolizes the population loss, job flight and spreading blight of the larger city.

The slippage is kind of ironic in the case of Warren, because few other suburbs acted as bellicose toward Detroit in the recent past, though its current leaders clearly have toned down the hostility.

Rapid racial change? That happened in the 1960s in Detroit, and it has similarly taken place in such working class suburbs in recent years as Eastpointe, Harper Woods and Redford.

Cuts to police, fire and EMS? Those have been taking place in Detroit for years, and now many suburbs are discovering what its like to get by with less protection.

Scrappers? Harper Woods cops arrested two people who had harvested copper inside a vacant home Tuesday.

The reasons for the suburban problems are almost universally blamed on the economy, including the recession, the housing crisis and the mini-Depression that started in Michigan even before 2008. I haven’t heard any serious charges that one person or a group of people are responsible for the empty homes, vacant strip malls and hurting city coffers that dot our region, or the shrinking regional population.

So why can’t people accept that Detroit’s fundamental problems can be traced to the economy, and not to individuals?

Over the years, Detroit’s many critics have found lots of villains: Coleman Young is far and away Public Enemy No. 1, but other Detroit destroyers include Kwame Kilpatrick, any city council since about 1975, criminals, unions and even Detroiters themselves.

A number of economists, geographers, historians and other experts attribute the underlying reason for Detroit’s decline as economic, and point to the 1950s, when factories closed or moved to the suburbs, automation was introduced and Detroit residents began moving to the suburbs. The white population in the city dropped by more than 350,000 in the 1950s alone.

Has there been mismanagement and corruption? Definitely. But those are side issues compared to the tectonic shifts in the local economy in the past 60 years.

As suburbs continue to Detroitify and endure the ongoing economic crisis, perhaps we could have more regional healing if suburbanites would show more empathy toward the origins of Detroit’s crisis.

As someone once said, there’s nothing wrong with Detroit that couldn’t be cured by getting a job to every Detroiter who wanted one.

I think it was Coleman Young who said that.