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Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

nytimes.com

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Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#61

Post by cat199 »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #36
dizzystar wrote: post #22

Detroit, 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. Nowada…

> with the economic system which designates their labor as a cost to be repressed rather than a service to be rewarded,

yes, because this totally is specific to working class / blue collar jobs. Everyone in the white collar bourgeoisie is clearly well represented and valued across all industries and in all locations in the USA. Further, desk work, and $5 lattes should always viewed as a reward with no variations in personal preference, those that do not agree are simply uneducated.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#62

Post by [deleted] »

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #41
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Nowada…

To clarify, the people working by staring at computers are also seen as a cost to be repressed and not a service to be rewarded. Supply and demand has made the cost resistant to repression up til now, but the economic system is hard at work finding out how to change that. One might even go so far as to postulate if the IT industries push to get more people into IT is so that labor supply goes up leading to labor cost…

[deleted]

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#63

Post by Bartweiss »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #49
Bartweiss wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty weird article, without some kind of further support it really smacks of a manufactured narrative. 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 of…

> Detroit was never all impoverished Eh, it was pretty close. What neighborhoods are you thinking of? Places that are actually independent cities like Grosse Pointe don't count. Palmer Woods, maybe, I guess? Anything else?

Fair question - I did have Grosse Pointe in mind, among others, and that is kind of cheating. Hopefully the NYT is careful enough that they're not comparing Detroit neighborhoods to inner ring suburbs, or the whole thing is sort of bust. I was also thinking about some of the Downtown blocks, but those aren't especially residential.

I don't have a handy answer for a city-limits residential area which was doing all that well, at least not in ~2009 when things were at their worst.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#64

Post by mikeyouse »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #45
ebbv wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People are moving from Ann Arbor to Detroit, really?

Yeah, downtown is really on the upswing.. There are a number of places listing (and renting) $2,000/month apartments and a ton of $500k condos moving through the market.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#65

Post by aantix »

afuchs wrote: post #57
dizzystar wrote: post #22

Detroit, 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…

> Detroit, 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,…

>This statement taken in the context of the current cultural zeitgeist, sounds like an argument that gay marriage should not be allowed to exist

I didn't take it like that at all - I figured the emphasis was on the "calloused hands", meaning a typical, married, blue-collared life was nothing to be ashamed of.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#66

Post by e5india »

afuchs wrote: post #57
dizzystar wrote: post #22

Detroit, 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…

> Detroit, 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,…

Perhaps it's me that misunderstood, but I took that 'nothing shameful' to be more about the 'calloused hands' portion of the sentence. It was meant, I think, to be a poetic way of referring to people who perform manual labor.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#68

Post by dashundchen »

Bartweiss wrote: post #40
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> This isn't a unique problem, and we need a plan for healthy shrinking of cities and countries.

I'll add as someone from the rust belt, while we do need to understand how to shrink cities, a lot of this shrinking in the central city was self-inflicted by sprawl.

The metro populations of many of these rust belt cities stalled out in the 1950's-70's but for the most part has been relatively stable since then. Yes, wealthy industry closed or left, but the population was still there.

However short-sighted suburban sprawl, poor planning, and racial segregation hollowed out the central cities while urbanized area doubled or quadrupled the infrastructure a region needed to support. Suburbs boomed with new infrastructure while the city was cannibalized.

Urban sprawl in Cleveland - same metro pop in 1948 as in 2002, at least 3 times the land area http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/03/16/sprawl-in-its-purest-f...

Same story with urban sprawl in Buffalo - same metro population, triple the urbanized area http://www.urbanophile.com/2010/04/27/chuck-banas-this-is-sp...

Unfortunately there seems to be no political will to stop, even as it consumes the older suburbs now. Subdivisions, new roads, sewers and office parks continue to be thrown up on the edges while a new wave crumbles. The low density of the sprawl can't generate enough revenue to sustain itself - but by the time the bill comes for renewal, the developers have already moved on to a new ring of exurbs.

I wish these cities would look towards regional planning and government like Portland and Toronto.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenbelt_(Golden_Horseshoe)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_growth_boundary

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#69

Post by werber »

I live less than a mile from my job downtown, and ended up hospitalized this winter while walking home because the city still doesn't take care of the streets (let alone the sidewalks). The downtown core and some adjacent neighborhoods (Corktown, Midtown, Lafayette Park, Brush Park, Cass Corridor, among a few others) are rapidly changing, but it feels like outside of the T shape that those neighborhoods make ( https://mogodetroit.org/system-map/ , the bike share system doesn't extend outside of this) you're in a completely different city. When I go for a walk at night and there isn't a weekday sports event, the downtown is still incredibly quiet and mostly empty. I have this constant nagging guilt about the revitalization of Detroit being for people like me (young white tech professional) and not the people who stayed and didn't give up on the city, because I had no faith I'd ever be back a decade ago. The artsier people I know are already moving to the edges of the T into places like Hubbard Farms and the North End, and it feels inevitable that people will be displaced by the "rebirth".

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#70

Post by curiouscat321 »

I grew up in the Metro Detroit area and moved out to the coasts after graduating from Umich a couple years ago.

There’s more excitement around Detroit than I’ve seen at any point in my life. As somebody from the suburbs, my family would actively avoid Detroit unless we were going to a baseball game.

That’s changed. There’s many great restaurants and downtown feels more like a real city.

But, all of my friends still left the state. If you’re college educated, there’s a 60/40 chance you’ll leave Michigan right after graduation. Even worse if you graduate from UMich, which is scary since it’s the state’s flagship university.

The white-collar jobs are there, but they can’t compete with the jobs in other parts of the country. I graduated CS and I can’t name a single friend that didn’t move to the west coast. Even after the COL differences, you still come out ahead by leaving the state.

I want Detroit to grow and I’d love to move back. I just need some solid jobs to attract me back.

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