DETROIT — On Halloween weekend in 2010, Detroit burned.
Vacant properties — Victorian homes with boarded windows, doors hanging loose and no one inside to protect them — became tinderboxes as arsonists moved through abandoned neighborhoods on the city’s infamous annual “Devil’s Night.” By Monday morning, Detroit had counted 169 fires, most of them in long-abandoned houses.
Wracked by economic decline, population collapse and on the brink of bankruptcy, the city was overwhelmed, leading an exhausted fire chief to say: “Let them burn.”…