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I'm certain that's part of it, but another factor is general lack of funding and neglect.
Property taxes are largely what pay for road maintenance. Parts of Michigan are populous but have among the lowest home values in the nation, and patches of home vacancy. It's an area with low stability, as there are frequent mass layoffs when the US auto industry teeters on collapse from years of bad decision-making. Everyone loses their jobs at once and we have few social safety nets. The instability is reflected in property values.
There are blighted regions where one can find entire neighborhoods of homes that were just abandoned, with individual homes that could be purchased for as little as $1,000 - but nobody wants them. So there's a lot of infrastructure to maintain and no tax money coming in. The city of Detroit has even toyed with the idea of letting other infrastructure crumble in these areas - things like shutting off street lights. The remaining residents (who often can't escape) have pushed back pretty hard, as it's often a matter of life safety. Large numbers of people are just trying to survive (literally). The metro Detroit area had around 17,000 reported violent crimes last year, and who knows how many unreported.
Nearby Flint Michigan (home of some General Motors factories) was discovered to have highly toxic levels of heavy metals in the drinking water around 6 years ago. It made national news for months, but to my knowledge very little has been done to fix it. Residents simply don't drink the water.
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