Well, the contrarian view is a nice reality check, but... despite the fact the Packard plant may have shut down in 1956, it's still relevant today. Despite the fact that there may be a bustling factory across the street from half a square mile of abandoned prairie, the prairie is still relevant. Because in a healthy city, you don't have mile-long abandoned plants or half a square mile of prairie land, because the land is too valuable to be left that fallow.
It's a gallant try at some sort of defense, but no sale. Find me half a square mile of abandoned grassland in the Austin city limits, or some other healthy city.
I think the author's message is that, yes, Detroit is definitely hurting, but that isn't an excuse for journalists to be lazy or distort the truth. His "make sure you crop out the office park from the photo" comment is hilarious.
I can think of at least two within a few miles of downtown Miami. And they've been that way for years. Both are government owned properties that they're dragging their feet with, like the prairie in the article.
I haven't lived anywhere else so I don't have any other examples. I guess I'll just have to take the "Miami real estate implosion hurRRrr" everyone is about to reply with.
And I guess my point is that I'm not convinced it's a distortion of the truth at all. Frankly, the photos you see are not merely processed photos sliced and diced to distort the point, they are really a fairly accurate representation of the city. It is not as if you have to go hunting these things out. You sit in Comerica Park and you are looking out at empty skyscrapers. You drive to Comerica park and take even a brief detour from the highway and you are immediately in parts of the city so desolate that you're not even afraid for your safety anymore, like you would be in a bad part of town, because anybody trying to carjack you would have to sprint across a hundred feet of open field. You take a cruise up the river and the contrast between the Canadian side and the American side is stark.
Yeah, there's spots of life, certainly, but those are what you have to go hunting for. Everyone is writing the same story because it's a true story.
I am a big believer in making sure you know the problem before you go looking for the solution, and informing the public can be a slow process. That's where we are right now, learning about the problem. I actually think that trying to paint the city in some sort of false good light would harm the recovery attempts, both by underselling the problems, and wrecking up the recovery narrative that will be a critical problem of getting things back on track.
(If such a thing is even possible, which frankly I'm pessimistic about. Something that you may not know if you don't live around here is that while Detroit is dead, the greater metropolitan Detroit area is alive, and bits of it are even thriving. I think within my lifetime it may no longer be the "greater metropolitan Detroit area" but merely southeast michigan, or perhaps named after one of the formerly-suburbs. Bringing Detroit back to the former glory is very hard because even if for some reason you might consider moving there, there's somewhere else in Southeast Michigan within an hour's drive that is a better choice for you, for almost every purpose. That's Detroit's real problem at this point; the factories aren't coming back, and all the other possible things it could become were crowded out into the suburbs or Ann Arbor, so there's just absolutely nothing left for Detroit. Really, Detroit is already dead, the question now is whether the location is so prime that a new city will plant itself on the same ground.)
Yeah I wondered about this too while watching the excellent BBC documentary Requiem for Detroit last night... it would seem to me from my family still living in the burbs of Detroit that a lot of those cities are doing fine, with some thriving. With so many people leaving Michigan, which burb is likely to grow/become the new detroit though?
I'm aware of that; however that won't result in the kind of population growth that parts of the suburbs are experiencing and those same areas haven't had mass exodus' either.
As Detroit transforms into something other than 'the largest city in Michigan' (which I guess it probably already has), I'm just wondering which if the little toes so to speak is in the strongest position to challenge for the new #1 spot.
Cincinnati has had a similar problem with some plots of land on the river, between the stadiums. It laid fallow for longer than I've been alive. Just this year ground was finally broke.
It's easy to find examples of undeveloped spaces within the city limits of Detroit because it's density has always been fairly low by modern urban standards. The surface area of Detroit is larger than that of San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan combined, but the population is obviously lower.
You could easily compare Detroit to Los Angeles or San Jose, though, two other cities that have historically low densities. The open space in Detroit seems fundamentally different from, say, South San Jose or the mountain ranges in LA, because of the presence of formerly-occupied urban ruins.
I drove through Detroit 10 years ago knowing nothing more about the place than being the home of the American car industry. I was shocked at what I found, crumbling buildings, empty lots, streets in total disrepair. I took photos and showed them to friends and family, who couldn't believe their eyes and wanted to see more.
It's true that much of the decay isn't recent. It's also true that real people are living and suffering in the city.
But it's a fact of life that people are voyeurs, and the more grisly the topic, the more they like to gawp. To many, Detroit is a living cautionary tale, a city with problems, someone to gossip about and resure themselves that at least where they live isn't as bad as that.
I was in Detroit a few weeks ago during the jazz festival, the first American city to be visited under my US visa (I'm permanent resident in Canada). It was beautiful and shocking in a very post-apocalyptic way every Fallout fan has dreamt of: at noon on a Saturday the streets were completely abandoned. We rode the People Mover with 2 other people, looking at gorgeous art-deco monuments to capitalism. At the shoreline we met visitors of the festival, most of whom were tourists.
The only busy areas of the city were the casinos where we almost suffocated from the ubiquitous fog of cigarette smoke. Overall it was very interesting but largely as abandoned as what you described.
One of the problems with Journalism (capital J) as it's practiced is that the stories are created at the editor's desk and a reporter is simply dispatched to the scene to provide supporting evidence. There is room for a certain level of conflicting reports but for the most part everything will plug in to a predefined narrative.
Lazy journalism, as lazy writing, as most lazy expressions of an idea is called a cliché. The same tired shots of Detroit (and other rust-belt cities) is now a cliché for the decline of American industry. What is happening today is not the same as what happened 30 years ago, maybe they should be photographing the empty strip-malls that liter this country.
And the west coast may have their streets paved with gold, but I've never seen so many people from an area complain about not being able to get laid.
I'm a recent grad, got a software engineer job, and just recently rented a beautiful loft in Downtown Detroit, and I LOVE it. There's a lot of decay in the city, but there's also a lot going on that gets overshadowed. TEDx Detroit just occurred last night and touched on all of these things much better than I could. They should have videos posted soon: http://tedxdetroit.com/
I keep saying to my family that we need to buy up Detroit properties while it's cheap, because Las Vegas is going to relocate there.
Seriously, think about it. The water problem in Las Vegas is going to be so severe within the next 10 years that they will have to either dig a freaking 1000 mile long canal to bring the stuff in. The inlets of the Hoover damn will be above water level, meaning no power.
So, a stalled out city easily accessible from both Canada and anywhere in the United States that is completely decaying and desperately in need of outside capital, and a city that is pushing the limits of resources. All it takes for casinos to relocate to Detroit is a politician with open arms and huge tax breaks.
It's a gallant try at some sort of defense, but no sale. Find me half a square mile of abandoned grassland in the Austin city limits, or some other healthy city.