Local activists and even the CBC point to Pittsburgh as basically Hamilton's to-do list, and former mayor Tom Murphy in particular.
Basically, his approach was this: cut spending brutally, raise taxes (especially parking tax, which improves revenue, cuts traffic, and gets more people into bikes and buses), call in favors from philanthropists, bulldoze the steel mills into profitable waterfront land.
Too late for Detroit to make those changes, though.
And Pittsburgh has not had an insurrection in living memory.
You could, of course, attempt to disprove Daniel_Newby's contention that demographics is at the bottom of this. All that you need to do is provide a single counterexample by pointing out an instance--just one will suffice for our purposes--of a city that became richer or that economically speaking at least held its own even as the percentage of blacks comprising its population grew. This seems like a simple enough task.
1950 - 16% black 2000 - 81% black http://historydetroit.com/statistics/
Detroit used to be prosperous because blue collar Caucasians and Africans are damn valuable in a world without robots. Now they are cognitively obsolete.
P.S. Bill Gates decided that the problem was that not everybody in our world of shameful inequalities could get a world-class university prep education. He paid out of his own pocket to make the pilot project happen. The result was ... almost no improvement.