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Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay

theguardian.com

41–50 of 172 posts

Re: Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay

#41

I work at a hyperscaler, for autos, in Detroit. It’s the worst it’s been since 2020 imo. Stella is cost cutting and just lost their ceo, ford is attached to google, GM literally just left the rencen. The t1s are being canabalized. This article is a joke.

What is a hyperscaler for autos?

Re: Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay

#42
post #35
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sun belt took wind out of their sails. And even they are starting to see softening demand. Miami just cancelled an A-class commercial high rise due to weak demand. In Austin, rents are tanking. It’s very hard to revive a town or city when the tax base is way down. I thought Detroit was going to succeed but they simply have too much ground to manage with their revenue. And there isn’t a way to shrink a shrinking c…

Insurance premium increases have killed a lot of the housing cost advantage that Florida used to have.

Why are the premiums going up? Hurricanes?

Re: Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay

#43

Unfortunate timing for this to front page here given that Detroit and Michigan in general are going to endure some extremely rough times in the coming months and years. Detroits revival just took some direct hits.

How do you mean? A lot of things have stayed pretty consistent here over the years. What are you expecting?

Michigan relies on fast trade with Ontario. Anything that interrupts it hits Michigan hard.

Re: Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay

#44

30 miles West in Ann Arbor, there are tech gigs but not tons of them. If you are apart of the University of Michigan, there are tons of opportunities via the college and the groups there, but if not there aren't tons of openings. Detroit itself is an amazing city, but it isn't a tech hub, nor is it for everyone. It is the shell of the automotive companies that started to move their operations of out the country in th…

> This piece is nothing but an advertisement for Dan Gilbert.

For an outlet that “thanks to our reader-funded model, what we cover isn’t dictated by the algorithms of the tech titans” they did manage to cram a surprising number of ads in there

Re: Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay

#45

I really thought the major "rust belt" cities were going to blow up after the big COVID WFH push. Why spend 2-10x as much to live in one of four coastal metros when you could get the same pay while living somewhere much cheaper. The biggest issue with these cities in the last 50 years has been a lack of high paying jobs and WFH tech jobs essentially negate that issue. There are a ton of American cities that have fall…

It seems evident that people, by and large, don’t like freezing temperatures.

I'll take the cold over water shortages, wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, or excessive heat any day.

I wonder if we'll see more people coming to the rust belt as the climate gets worse.

Re: Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay

#46

I really thought the major "rust belt" cities were going to blow up after the big COVID WFH push. Why spend 2-10x as much to live in one of four coastal metros when you could get the same pay while living somewhere much cheaper. The biggest issue with these cities in the last 50 years has been a lack of high paying jobs and WFH tech jobs essentially negate that issue. There are a ton of American cities that have fall…

Most companies will cut your pay based on where you live, though. You aren’t usually paid the same. That isn’t the norm. Secondly and probably more important is there is zero guarantees that WFH will be supported by the work places they can support it will, we have seen a huge RTO surge. I’d hate to be in one of these cities and get that call. If WFH opportunities had legal protections and incentives it’d be a differ…

Whether or not locality-based pay is the norm is an open question. Every place I've ever worked had a budget for the role and that was that, but most places I've worked only hire folks within the US who don't need visa sponsorship so that's already a smaller group than "anyone who can type JavaScript into a computer."

Would you rather live and rent in NYC and work from home for 4 years until asked to commute again, or live and rent in Detroit or Pittsburgh or Indianapolis and take that $50-400k you saved and move?

Moving is easy and if you need to move to support an RTO mandate, especially if you were hired remote and weren't local you can almost certainly negotiate some relocation assistance. It's not a big deal to move unless you have kids in school which if you went remote during COVID and had a kid basically immediately is still likely not a huge issue. Moving in middle school or high school can be impactful, moving during kindergarten or first grade is a nothingburger.

Re: Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay

#47

30 miles West in Ann Arbor, there are tech gigs but not tons of them. If you are apart of the University of Michigan, there are tons of opportunities via the college and the groups there, but if not there aren't tons of openings. Detroit itself is an amazing city, but it isn't a tech hub, nor is it for everyone. It is the shell of the automotive companies that started to move their operations of out the country in th…

I was there about a year ago with a couple of friends, stopped for a night while driving through Michigan to go up north. It was just so eerie throughout the entire day. Incredibly wide streets, but sometimes you would walk for 5 mins before you saw a single soul. Maybe because it was a bit of a chilly day as well, but it felt like the city was built for way more people, and there just isn’t enough now.

Re: Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay

#48
There's a lot of good stuff going on in Detroit. I've worked in tech in Detroit for quite some time. The NewLab building that opened a year ago next to the recently-rehabbed, stunningly-beautiful, gigantic Michigan Central, is one-block by one-block and several stories tall and an amazing innovation hub. GM and Ford are two of the largest companies in the world, and - this isn't obvious because of their main industry - each employ 4,000-6,000 tech and software engineers. Dan Gilbert is an ultra-successful, entrepreneur genius, and he and his companies support an entrepreneurial culture and ecosystem in downtown Detroit.

If you're a ycombinator type person, and you move to Detroit, you're going to live in a cool neighborhood like Woodbridge, Corktown, Hubbard Farms, Midtown, Milwaukee Junctions, etc; go out for drinks at Ladder 4, Motor City Wine, Kiesling, etc; go out to eat at Ima, Baobab Fare, Batch, etc; go out for entertainment at Spot Lite, Lincoln Street Art Park, Outer Limits etc; and enjoy all of the culture.

Re: Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay

#49

I really thought the major "rust belt" cities were going to blow up after the big COVID WFH push. Why spend 2-10x as much to live in one of four coastal metros when you could get the same pay while living somewhere much cheaper. The biggest issue with these cities in the last 50 years has been a lack of high paying jobs and WFH tech jobs essentially negate that issue. There are a ton of American cities that have fall…

That did start to happen, but rent near downtown Detroit is >$2k/month, which pushes out most of the people that want to live there.

Re: Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems evident that people, by and large, don’t like freezing temperatures.

I'll take the cold over water shortages, wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, or excessive heat any day. I wonder if we'll see more people coming to the rust belt as the climate gets worse.

"Just move north" is a common refrain from people who don't understand what climate change means.
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