Surprised by all the skepticism in this thread. As someone who grew up in Metro Detroit, moved away, and came back it is very obvious that Detroit is on the rebound. I'm not sure what metrics show it, but it's real.
Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving
31–40 of 182 posts
Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving
#32Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo, and so on got absolutely destroyed after all the mills were shut down. The bar for reviving is incredibly low. Those that could leave, left. The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left. Detroit has UM, Cleveland has Case Western, Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon which are all top-flight schools. In a strange way, the…
What’s your thesis? Those top flight schools are staffed by people who are at best indifferent to the people drinking $3 beers in a plastic cup and on average actively despise them. They have very, very low rates of divorce but their hands aren’t calloused and they don’t get married in front of an altar.
Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving
#33[deleted]
Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving
#34Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo, and so on got absolutely destroyed after all the mills were shut down. The bar for reviving is incredibly low. Those that could leave, left. The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left. Detroit has UM, Cleveland has Case Western, Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon which are all top-flight schools. In a strange way, the…
I'm sorry I have to do it; Detroit does not have U of Mich. U of Mich is 45 minutes west in Ann Arbor. Some U of M grads go over to Detroit, but it's not like U of M students live in Detroit. They are very separate. Detroit is mostly reviving because Ann Arbor, where U of M is, is way too expensive. The Ferndale area of Detroit is becoming what Ann Arbor was when I grew up in the 80s; all about its local community an…
Check Zillow right now -- Ferndale is not particularly cheaper than Ann Arbor these days. More importantly, my Ann Arbor Area to Detroit-ish commute is shorter (in time, not distance) than my friends working in the same building coming from Ferndale. When Ferndale was "cheap," I could have bought a literal mansion in Detroit with my sophomore intern money, cash in hand.
To the GP's comments, Detroit has done a lot to come up in the world on its own, though I'm not sure I like the idea of Ford buying the old train station, nor am I entirely in love with the $2~3000/mo apartments in midtown and I kinda wish it still had more of its grunge pricing to go with the definite grunge feeling that still lingers...
To argue more specifically with the parent's point, the statistical area certainly counts Ann Arbor, and that count is no less reasonable than Oakland being counted with SF. Commute times from Ann Arbor the rest of Metro Detroit are entirely reasonable compared to the rest of the major cities in the country. Whether you're willing to accept any commute longer than walking across the street is a personal decision, clearly a significant fraction of the population will accept it.
Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving
#35[deleted]
Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving
#36Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo, and so on got absolutely destroyed after all the mills were shut down. The bar for reviving is incredibly low. Those that could leave, left. The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left. Detroit has UM, Cleveland has Case Western, Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon which are all top-flight schools. In a strange way, the…
>Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. There is nothing wrong with a town that has $3 beers in a plastic cup and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter.
Sure, but the money for that has to come from somewhere. Nowadays, "working-class, blue-collar" stuff does not make money, and if "working-class, blue-collar" people identify with the economic system which designates their labor as a cost to be repressed rather than a service to be rewarded, I'm not sure how much I can do about that.
Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving
#37Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo, and so on got absolutely destroyed after all the mills were shut down. The bar for reviving is incredibly low. Those that could leave, left. The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left. Detroit has UM, Cleveland has Case Western, Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon which are all top-flight schools. In a strange way, the…
I'm sorry I have to do it; Detroit does not have U of Mich. U of Mich is 45 minutes west in Ann Arbor. Some U of M grads go over to Detroit, but it's not like U of M students live in Detroit. They are very separate. Detroit is mostly reviving because Ann Arbor, where U of M is, is way too expensive. The Ferndale area of Detroit is becoming what Ann Arbor was when I grew up in the 80s; all about its local community an…
> Detroit is mostly reviving because Ann Arbor, where U of M is, is way too expensive.
I wouldn't say "mostly." It's mostly due to huge numbers of job moving to or being created downtown by Dan Gilbert's umbrella of companies(mostly Quicken Loans). Additionally, many businesses in metro detroit are moving from the suburbs to downtown.
I'm not so sure Detroit is any cheaper than Ann Arbor these days, either. At least not in the downtown & midtown areas.
Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving
#38Detroit is an odd place. For years of going there for work it was tough to find locally owned restaurants in favor of chains, it’s do-able but you might end up in weird places like a polish restaurant literally in the basement of a house a few blocks off Woodward. The people who identify with Detroit really do so. There is at first an inexplicable pride of being “from the D”, but it’s nice, there are really diverse a…
> It’s an odd place. That's exactly how I felt living in Baltimore. Now that I live in New York, everyone and everything seems so normal, but in a dull kind of way. America's downtrodden and resurgent smaller cities have a lot going for them in terms of culture, character, the resiliency of their people. I really hope they can find some measure of economic success.
I feel that way about Baltimore too, although I've only visited a bunch.
I think there's a really fine line though between a city like Baltimore and one like Buffalo, where I did live for a few years and revisited after a decade absent.
Buffalo seems to try to redevelop a neighborhood, but after not finding the success they hoped for will abandon that neighborhood and move on to try another.
When I was first in Buffalo in the early 2000s it was downtrodden but had promise, but my visit there last summer was incredibly depressing.
Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mario's[1] for excellent Italian food. Xoxhimilco[2] for excellent Mexican food. Antonio's[3] in the burbs. New Peking[4] in GC for excellent Chinese food. I've lived in Michigan 30 years now. Came here for grad school, first at MSU, then down to Wayne State for Ph.D. Never left. There is something about this place. Even when we are getting the crap kicked out of us ... we don't give up. It took a long time to get ri…
> Private and charter schooling is doing a great job of fixing that, giving parents a choice Free private schools? If not they are giving parents that can afford it a choice. Just like wealthy expats tend to place their kids in good private schools in poor places because they can afford it. As long as education isn't good for everybody it's just another way to stack the deck.
I would be really interested what you did with your kids'(if you have any) education.
Tell us what you practiced.
Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving
#40Weird that the article does not cite a single economic or demographic indicator to support its assertion. For example, Detroit's population has declined so far this decade at about the same pace as it declined from 1990-2000 (though not at the disastrous pace it declined from 2000-2010, when the city lost a quarter of its population). Sounds like far from a revival.
As always, those of us who live here or nearby (in my case) understand what's happening in Detroit, and are more than happy to watch everyone else in the country dismiss it and look for the negative statistics. Detroit is one of the only cities in the country that seems to attract this mid-brow "are they really improving, though? Yeah, right" dismissal. As someone on the ground, if you want the negative statistics to…
> more than happy to watch everyone else in the country dismiss it and look for the negative statistics
It's funny - this is exactly the opposite of how I feel about Detroit. I'm enormously skeptical of these turnaround stories, but it's not at all because I want the place to fail.
I grew up in a less-famous part of the rust belt, which like Detroit has been losing population since 1950. I've been hearing about the coming revitalization since I was 10, but without exception the result has been a huge, unrewarding investment to create one new shopping complex or clean up and develop a yuppie-friendly block of apartments and restaurants. It's an approach that gentrified Hell's Kitchen and the Combat Zone, but it's a complete loss without a desirable city encircling the spot under development.
I don't just want Detroit to succeed for it's own sake, although that's obviously a big deal to a lot of people. I want Detroit to be a flagship for Cleveland and Gary and Buffalo and Pittsburgh and all the other places that never seem to make good on their potential. And in the long run, for Japan, Serbia, Ukraine, and so on. This isn't a unique problem, and we need a plan for healthy shrinking of cities and countries.
I want so badly for Detroit to succeed. The downtown revitalizations are admirable, Hantz Woodlands is one of the coolest urban design projects I've seen in years, there's so much being tried. But when I read an article about how Detroit is reviving because housing prices are high, and the real turnaround will come when the population starts growing again? It sounds like my hometown, all willful blindness and attempts to dive straight back into the broken development patterns that got us here in the first place.
We need something better than that.