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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

#81

Post by trop »

magduf wrote: post #50
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…

>and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. You can scream at a TV all you want, but that's never going to turn you into a horse. On a more serious note, the industries that made these cities what they are are mostly gone now, and they're not coming back. The thing that made these cities attractive for these industries is no longer all that relevant: their location on the water. These days,…

> their location on the water

Which I misread as "the location of their water". Which is actually quite serious. See

https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/in-dayton-ohio-an-econo...

> As states like California face major water shortages, city officials in Dayton sense a business opportunity. ... the self-filtering, self-recharging freshwater supply, along with the rivers, once made Dayton attractive to water-intensive industries in the 19th century.

> Mills, factories, and countless little breweries lined the river before Prohibition, and Dayton was a hub of innovation and wealth.

> ...

> “We’re running into limits,” says Peter Gleick, the head of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Oakland, California. “...In the past we’ve sort of assumed enough water would always be available, and I think we can no longer assume that’s going to be the case.”

> ...

> “Back to the midwest” — that phrase is music to Karen Thomas’s ears. Thomas is the head of water marketing for Dayton (yes, that’s actually a job).

> “We have an abundant water source,” she says. “We don’t believe that we would have to worry about water.”

> ...

> “Water is a public good, but it’s also a commodity,” she says.

> An economic development team in Dayton has conducted talks with several food processors, manufacturers, and beverage makers that could use an inexpensive and abundant supply of water. Companies that choose Dayton would face little of the regulation placed on water diversions in the Great Lakes basin; here, if you can drill a well, you can drain it.

The article continues on to pollution issues in the Midwest, so more twists ahead.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#82

Post by SquirrelOnFire »

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…

>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.

Maybe by pointing to blue collar work that still pays well. A buddy of mine is an auto mechanic and is the sole income earner for his family. They do just fine in St Louis (another city like Detroit and Pitt). Another friend of mine is a pipe fitter for gas pipelines who works 3-6 months a year and earns ~150-200K depending on contracts. Spends the rest of the year surfing and diving.

Trades do, in fact, make money. Pay attention to how much you spend next time you call a plumber.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#83

Post by jamesrcole »

e5india wrote: post #66
afuchs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think that interpretation is absolutely correct, because the quote in question is "There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman..." which says nothing about the gender of the person marrying that man or woman. It goes on to say "...while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter", which, in the context, is easily assumed to be a man and a woman, but which isn't actually, as it's referring to the hypothetical person and the man or woman they are marrying.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#84

Post by karpodiem »

benrbray wrote: post #76
jrochkind1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are moving from Ann Arbor to Detroit, really?

I grew up in Michigan and attended UM. I can say anecdotally that very, very few people I knew (mostly from math + engineering) stayed in Michigan after graduating. On the other hand, many people I knew who graduated from Michigan State ended up taking jobs in and around Detroit. I found an article [1] which claims that 40% of UM's living alumni currently live in Michigan. I would wager that the rates for recent grad…

UofM EECS '08 graduate working for Plex Systems in Troy, MI. Plex (plex.com) makes ERP software, like SAP/Oracle. We're focused on the manufacturing portion, while SAP/Oracle focus on financials.

I grew up in Troy, MI - '04 Troy High. I now live in downtown Detroit, right off of Grand Circus Park.

Plex generates $115 million in ARR. Plex and Duo Security are the largest 'pure SaaS' software outfits in Michigan that I'm aware of.

If you're interested in working for Plex, shoot me your paperwork/Github username - akarpowitsch at plex dot com

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#85

Post by gilbetron »

Detroit seems to be no longer in freefall, certainly. And, I suppose, it is technically reviving, but the upward progress is slow, especially in comparison to the depths it has fallen. My nephews like to go down there with their friends, but only to a small portion heavily protected - and that's cool. But they have been taught by their father on the places to avoid and what to do if you accidentally get in one - he owns a business that is downtown and that business often gets robbed.

Feel free to take a view of a summer night in Detroit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztGzzvchcUQ

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#86

Post by cabaalis »

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,…

> Few people anywhere have a problem with straight marriage. This statement taken in the context of the current cultural zeitgeist, sounds like an argument that gay marriage should not be allowed to exist. This type of statement often comes from someone who views the actions of others, that don't directly affect them, as a personal affront; someone who sees the existence of a different way of life as a personal attack. They often try to force others to to conform to their views, and then label any pushback they receive as bullying.

The statement you are quoting had nothing to do with marriage equality. I think maybe you are trying to ascribe attributes to whoever wrote that statement that do not exist. The person wrote "man or woman" in place of "person."

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#87

Post by biocomputation »

SquirrelOnFire wrote: post #82
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…

>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. Maybe by pointing to blue collar work that still pays well. A buddy of mine is an auto mechanic and is the sole income earner for his family…

I totally agree. My parents own a 'cabin' in a development in the mountains, and the biggest cabin in the development -by far- is owned by a a plumber. He has done very well, and I doubt he writes much, if any, code.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#88

Post by notatoad »

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…

> but these are all, culturally, working class blue collar cities, and there is really nothing wrong with that.

But if the blue collar jobs are drying up, there absolutely is something wrong with identifying "blue collar" as part of the local culture. There's nothing about working an office job or looking at a computer screen that requires you to drink $5 lattes. Turning up your nose at jobs that don't fit the local blue-collar "culture" isn't going to help any sort of recovery. This attitude seems to be part of the dangerous midwest mindset that if you wish hard enough, the manufacturing sector will rebound, and that's simply not realistic. Globalisation exists, and low-skill jobs can be done more cheaply in other countries. If you want a job you might have to take a white-collar one, and if you insist that your city is blue-collar the white collar jobs will go elsewhere (which they have already done, and which is why we keep hearing stories about detroit's decline).

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#89

Post by intended »

pm90 wrote: post #75
PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 costs going down. This has been discussed in great detail, especially here on HN. The consensus seems to be that even if you increase the supply by a lot, the nature of Software Engineering, its inherent complexity will restrict the supply of the highly skilled workers. This…

A critical aspect of that is the distribution of engineering skill is bimodal, if not multi modal.

People want a lot of top end coders. The lower and middle, far less so.

Lumping all comp sci labor into one skill and ability bracket prevents nuanced understanding.

Re: Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

#90

Post by daxorid »

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…

I'm old enough to remember when a significant part of the "dream of the Internet" was that knowledge workers could work anywhere with an ISP.

Obviously that dream was not widely realized, but there are some employers that will allow you to write code from the countryside.

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