Are there slums in the US?

There are certainly areas of very low income in the US as described in the other answers, with decrepit housing and slow services, and they are what Americans call "slums". But they are not remotely comparable to what the rest of the world generally means by the term. read more

This is a list of slums. A slum as defined by the United Nations agency UN-HABITAT, is a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing, squalor, and lacking in tenure security. According to the United Nations, the percentage of urban dwellers living in slums decreased from 47 percent to 37 percent in the developing world between 1990 and 2005. read more

Nowhere near all of Detroit would qualify as a slum, but there is more of a slum there than in most other US cities. I suspect, but can't prove that the slum areas in Detroit are larger than any individual colonia, but there are a lot of colonias. read more