Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

https://techtowndetroit.org/

A former colleague from decades ago runs it, so I visited it late last year. I was really impressed. They are very interested in enabling all sort of entrepreneurship in Detroit, including that of the tech kind.

For personal reasons, I'm pretty tied to San Francisco. But if I were starting a new business, I'd look hard at Detroit. In 1998, SF/SV was the heart of something new and different. But the Internet's success over the last 20 years means that much of what was then specialized local knowledge is now available everywhere.

Michigan's universities produce a steady stream of graduates; UMich Ann Arbor's CS program is well ranked. For hiring established talent, being able to actually afford a house is a big draw, and for those not tempted remote work is getting ever easier. There's plenty of educated non-tech labor; you could open a customer service center there or in one of many medium-sized towns nearby for prices that seem ridiculously low.

I think the only real drawback is that the shiniest VCs seem very reluctant to invest in companies that aren't in shiny places. But given what a devil's bargain VC money is, and given how much of it goes right into shiny-place prices, I suspect that many could have better odds of long-term success by taking money with a local or long-term focus.

For that same reason, I've always regretted not having money to buy real state in Detroit. No matter how bad things are, a city this big is bound to rebound sooner or later. I wonder how long it will take before "Detroit gentrification" becomes a thing.

As you say, the population - which the article insists is the key factor - shows no sign of recovering. It's simply ceased the plummet it was in during the economic crisis and preceding years. The rate of decline might be a bit slower than the 90s, but the second derivative is still 0. (If you made me offer a theory, I'd say 2008-2011 prematurely drove out people who would otherwise have left more gradually.)

I also noticed the line "Dreams of a house for a few thousand dollars seem like an old memory in some areas, where buildings can list for more than a million." The phrasing is circumspect; it carefully avoids saying that there are actually specific areas where home prices have gone from thousands to a million, and equivocates oddly between houses and buildings. Detroit was never all impoverished, and I have a sinking feeling that this sentence is comparing the current prices of Downtown Detroit to the past prices of northeast Detroit.

Certainly there are some bright spots in Detroit, the city's budget is less disastrous and the projects in bulldozing, resettlement, and urban forestry are a fascinating experiment. But all the evidence I can see says that a plan for Detroit which depends on a rising population anytime soon is basically doomed, whatever the changing look of the city.