I'm so torn by all these comments about whether Detroit has 'bounced back' or not. On one hand, it certainly seems like salaries, wages, rents, and prices are rising in the Detroit metro area, on the other hand parts of the city are in really bad shape.
My own perspective is to not focus on how to classify Detroit's status in relation to other cities and metrics, but to focus on what Detroit is. It's an eclectic area where poverty, middle class, and affluence collide. There are creative communities that butt right up against dangerous areas. It's a great area to bike since certain times of day cars are few and far between, and there is an upbeat sense of happiness in some communities. There's not much more to it other than it's the people's town and the behavior of individuals will have a lot to do with how Detroit fares in the coming years.
It's bouncing back big time. It's going to take 10 or more years for the whole city, but it will be unrecognizable in the central city in the next few years.
I say this because when I go riding my bike in Detroit on Monday nights 2,000 people ride with me. That's the kind of thing that makes people move in.
Hole in the wall restaurants have an hour wait. Big name restaurants take reservations weeks in advance.
Minor minor minor minor league soccer teams draw like 2,500 people.
The brand is strong. People are going to use it. There is a ton of energy down here and a shit ton of people who live right around the city who will move in once conditions are right, and they are becoming right for the hipsters and college kids.
Are you one of those critical mass riders who shuts down Campus Martius for a few hours a month?
'Cause if you guys could stop and let traffic through on our way home from work, that'd be really helpful. You could pass out pamphlets and get more riders that way.
I'm not one of the critical mass folks. I'm a slow roller, which seems to be the opposite of critical mass. We rider later after traffic, starting at 7:30. We break up our group of riders into small ones so cars don't have to wait a super long time. And instead of any kind of militant attitude we just roll with good vibes, talking with cars, waving at kids encouraging folks to join us.
It's hard not to smile when confronted by such a group.
Are you guys literally shutting down traffic for a few hours at a stretch? 'Cause that's a really shitty way to gain public support, and self-righteously informing people that you're doing them a favor by "getting them out of their cars" is only going to make it worse.
I have, BTW, ridden a bicycle exclusively for 18 years, and I've always enjoyed Critical Mass (our local rides top out around 50 people). It frustrates me how many of my fellow cyclists seem determined to shoot themselves in the foot, PR-wise.
I hadn't heard of Slow Roll. They might be better at handling traffic than the one Critical Mass ride I saw. They had several thousand riders going through a roundabout. It looked spontaneous as they had no detours posted, and a few cars were stuck in the loop for about an hour. They ride at the same time each (week? month?) so I just remember to not drive through that part of downtown on Fridays in the summer.
Really, though, I've looked into similar things, and can't understand how they're able to do it next to a police precinct without posting detours and without being fined or traffic controlled. But, it's Detroit. There are probably 10 cops covering downtown at any time, and they might not have the resources to police traffic on a Friday evening.
That said, I'm actually interested in this. Did you guys have to go through city hall and set up the detour routes and get permission from the affected businesses to lay down your route? The city I tried to set something up in would have allowed it, but there was a lot of paperwork and it was smaller than an organized ride.
In Atlanta, critical mass got up to 300+ riders before the city/police finally got tired of the illegal blocking of intersections. (They call it "corking") Atlanta police had 10-20 motorcycle cops follow the ride and pull over anyone who broke the law (running red lights, etc.) for a couple of weeks and the popularity quickly dropped off when people realized they had to still follow traffic laws. It still goes on every month, but it's more like 50 riders now.
There are also of course plenty of legal rides/events that get permits, police escorts(sometimes free), etc. We have something called "Atlanta Streets Alive" that shuts down several miles of large streets every few months to only pedestrian and bike traffic, allowing people to walk and play in the streets with no cars. Permits are required, off-duty police have to be hired to direct traffic at intersections etc.
I dunno if anything is officially organized, but remember the city pays its cops $14 an hour and they have to transport dead bodies in their cars. That's from my friend who is a cop.
The cops seem friendly and supportive. The city doesn't have the luxury of shutting down something that is positive.
We might shut down an intersection for 2-4 minutes while riders roll through the intersection. The corkers or people who block the intersection are instructed to be nice and apologize for delays and to encourage drivers to join us.
We roll at 7:30 which is well after traffic dies down and we do as much as possible to be respectful, like leaving a lane open so cars can pass us.
oh, for what it's worth, I apologize a bit to you. I know I'm likely coming off as a jerk, but I assure you it's unintended. You're just out for a bike ride.
As the motor city, it would be interesting if Detroit reinvented itself as the first American post-car city. i.e. Take roads, which are the most significant public space in most American cities and take it back from cars and give it to pedestrians and bicyclists.
I would love to see any city in the world take this architects proposal for São Paulo (a major concrete jungle) and run with it.
"...people who live right around the city who will move in once conditions are right..."
Probably not... because once the "conditions" are right... the price DEFINITELY will not be. But Detroit will probably draw more and more of the high end of the creative class. I won't argue that.
This can already be seen, housing is going to be a huge problem without some major investment in that area as well.
Nowhere beside Downtown, and maybe one other neighborhood, is worth living in right now, and the rent in those areas are starting to sky rocket.
Living in Cleveland I sometimes get contact by companies in Detroit looking for developers. I recently considered taking a position, but the housing situation made me reconsider.
It was either pay 3X the rent for an apartment Downtown, compared to my apartment in Cleveland, or have a 45-60 commute every day. Even with the increase in salary it wasn't worth the move.
A little late, but my post is in comparison to Cleveland, OH where for the same prices you could get something much nicer. I would also have many more living options available in Cleveland proper compared to the few areas in Detroit proper worth living.
I will say that if you are moving away from a coastal area then Detroit is pretty cheap and has some interesting things to offer. However, being from Cleveland I can enjoy the positives of Detroit with a 2 hour drive without having to live there.
Hipsters is approaching synonymous with young people at this point. If you're curious as to how young people in Detroit are making a living, I will give you some very concrete examples:
1. Me. I am the biz director of a fantastic startup.
2. My friends started a very popular band and play gigs profitably and organize parties.
3. Many people work in Quicken family of companies, many in real estate.
4. Many are web developers.
5. Some grow medicinal marijuana.
6. Several of my friends have started food trucks.
7. Many are servers or bartenders. I know a couple strippers too.
I could go on like this for a while. Though I know some young people who are on their parent's insurance or receive some help paying down their student loan debt, I know of very few people who live off CCs & their parents. They do exist, but they are very rare.
You forgot mustache, buying either extremely expensive things or extremely cheap things and generally preferring 'old-timey' things (VHS, vinyl) that have been surpassed.
It's not young people, it's young people with specific yet generic taste. Like goths. Only somehow lamer.
there seems to be an attitude that what happened to detroit was not related to policies and politics. i respectfully submit that significant lasting change in any system requires change in the environment.
Especially in the physical sense. The home of the big three tore down buildings, inserted parking lots, created large arteries to the suburbs, and that allowed white flight to take place.
It was definitely racially motivated. That's where the schism began; back at the height of Detroit when poor blacks from the South were encouraged to come to Detroit to work the assembly lines.
Also in the disruption of the Big 3 when faced with foreign competition (thought IIRC, this is related to policies and politics because the Big 3 were protected by import controls for a while).
I don't see how this would work, unless there are some nice suburbs/towns just outside Detroit, or companies allow a lot of remote work. Otherwise, you'd be hiring, have interested people up until you say the word "Detroit", then never hear from them again. Personally, I'd rather live somewhere I'm not likely to be mugged walking around the corner to the shops.
Detroit has bounced off the bottom. While we might exult in the ruin-porn of Detroit, it is a city on the mend, and is really an interesting city full of significant potential. I say that as a Canadian who travels to Detroit from the Toronto area, never feeling a moment of fear but enjoying some great restaurants, entertainment, and sports.
I've been hearing this every year for a while. The year Detroit turns it around seems to be the same as the year of linux on the desktop - this year, but then not.
The downtown is resurgent, and is certainly not a dump. Many of the suburbs are very affluent. There is a large area that is in very dire shape (which is, of course, the area that people focus on when they seek their ruin porn), but is no worse than it was 20 years ago, and in most cases is significantly better.
Detroit had been in decline for many, many decades. It hit bottom and is getting better.
"There is a large area that is in very dire shape... but is no worse than it was 20 years ago"
This is absolutely untrue. I live in Detroit and work with its property data on a daily basis. The physical state of the city has deteriorated significantly since the financial crisis of 2008-9.
The downtown that is resurgent encompasses 7.2 of 139 square miles. Most of the city has not bottomed out. People continue to leave, properties continue to burn, and the news of Detroit's resurgence remains greatly overstated.
Take a look here to see how Detroit has fared since 2008:
I agree with you. My father grew up in Detroit and I still have plenty of family there. What people don't understand is the scale of the problem and how far it has gone. I really can't see the situation changing unless Detroit either consolidates with some of its healthier suburbs or divests the massive amount of land that's currently draining its very limited resources. I don't think we can declare the city to be in rebound just because a kernel of affluence is reemerging. There's a looong way to go.
Those are interesting photos, but how do we know whether they are representative of an overall trend? Those locations seem to be selected manually to show houses in decay -- it's not a random sample, and it's probably not a representative sample.
Nobody doubts that there are decaying buildings in Detroit, but to see how Detroit has faired overall, you would need to look at the big picture, including properties that have been restored or rebuilt, but that weblog doesn't show that.
If you're having trouble relating to the numbers, here's a great episode of Parts Unknown that shows how bad Detroit is now, hosted by a guy who really likes Detroit. http://www.cnn.com/video/shows/anthony-bourdain-parts-unknow... (not so much the videos, but the text below.)
I suppose I do take a more macro level view, and have essentially written off many of the neighborhoods (what the banks and others should have done long ago). There are detached little islands of residents trying to make a stand, but -- as that blog shows -- they can't. Much of Detroit the urban area should be returned to nature and then, in a planned and considered fashion, built out again. To some degree this is happening, and it's interesting that many of the blog posts show houses in a very high level of disrepair, followed by an empty field: For the good of Detroit, the empty field is often a better state, and the bail-out Detroit should have gotten is billions to tear down houses and remediate lands that are long past the point of no return.
The resurgence does absolutely have to do with the sense of pride in the city, and the sense that it is a city for doing business, both required for the city to come back. Neither of those help houses neglected for decades on remote strips of perilous streets with no rational civic services.
They are also gated communities that have the worst "Fuck You, Got Mine" mentality. Mostly white and heavily racist, to the point where companies require their delivery-people who serve those areas to be white (because people in those neighborhoods won't open their doors for blacks).
Seriously, a very small part of the city core may be rebounding, but Detroit as a whole will remain a hell-hole for at least a decade.
"They are also gated communities that have the worst "Fuck You, Got Mine" mentality."
Oh, so what mentality would you like them to have? How about:
"Here, come on in, we missed you since the last riot!"
I'm completely not understanding this weird jump of yours where you go from "gated communities" to stereotyping such behavior as one that is due to a "Fuck You, Got Mine" attitude. Oh and it's mostly by racist white people, according to you.
Just let people be, and quit trying to meddle. It's really not rocket science. Why do you have to vilify people you don't like? If they were doing something truly bad, then you wouldn't need to vilify them by calling them racists or selfish.
I think, deep down, you know you have no argument. And you're simply fishing for approval by throwing around boogey-words that people are accustomed to reacting to in the way you want.
The answer to how the original person makes this leap is found in the "white flight" debate of the 1960s to 1980s. It's a point of reference that a lot of people on HN don't have (I do not, in any way, want to sound like I'm being demeaning or patronizing; it is an item for discussion, nothing more, and certainly not as an insult).
Having experienced it, and coming from a family that did, basically, just that, the "f-ck you I've got mine" is what drove a lot of that behavior. It could be more accurately expressed as "f-ck you guys, I'm out of here because I have the social, financial, and legal methods to do so," since a lot of the "good" neighborhoods had redlining practices that predated the mass exodus and, even though they became illegal, were still quietly, subtly enforced by real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and nearby property owners. A major symbol of white flight is the rise of the gated community. They gave a way to erect a literal barricade against the undesirables, regardless of skin color but always against "shady" characters.
The last problem is that white flight, and subsequent "I have money"-flight (again, regardless of skin color), essentially drained the urban cities like Detroit, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Chicago. Some of these are bouncing back--like Dallas--and some not so much. Areas we think of as "Chicago" are, in fact, separate legal municipalities propped up by the massive influx of wealth. The people who lived there commuted into the urban cores, generally on highways paid for on the backs of the people left in the urban areas, to jobs that contribute little to the city where they are located, and then fled back to their quiet suburb where they could enjoy "having theirs."
Is there anything, individually, wrong with what they did? Absolutely not. Those who "fled" took the opportunities available to do them and did so out of an interest of self-worth. The whole point behind flinging "f-ck you, I got mine" as a derogatory remark is that it is half taking out frustrations on a societal dysfunction, half human nature.
I don't know about those other cities you mentioned, but Pittsburgh has not been "essentially drained" by "white flight" like you are suggesting here. Neighborhoods in Pittsburgh are very walkable and very vibrant. If anything hollowed out Pittsburgh, it was the decline of the steel and manufacturing industries in the area. But Pittsburgh has somewhat rebounded with medical and technology industries.
I used to live in Pittsburgh and commute out to a small town outside the city limits. I enjoyed being near my friends and everything the city had to offer, but I didn't resent people who lived outside the city limits.
Highways aren't "paid for on the backs of the people left in the urban areas." They're paid for out of gasoline taxes. We might be better off with more mass transit, but that's kind of a different discussion.
When I was in downtown Detroit a few years ago, I did notice a distinct lack of public transit options. But it is bitterly cold in Detroit, and it is difficult to imagine the kind of cafe culture taking root there that you see in other places. I had trouble going outside because I had not brought a ski mask, and there was a stiff breeze coming off the lake and a subzero temperature that day. I also remember there being a lot of churches with bars on the windows, like prisons. I don't know what was up with that-- I guess it's an anti-riot measure?
I hope they succeed in revitalizing the area... it is a shame how far it has fallen since the glory days.
Well, I'd be more inclined to believe it if we had some sort of reference to it. I couldn't even find anything using casual searches. So I'd say it very well is something that's made up and/or propagated by people that seek to discredit gated communities. You can't just pass off second-hand "rumours" as facts. Even if it's something that's "commonly known", we'd be doing a disservice to those that live in gated communities that aren't racist at all.
The suburbs being affluent does nothing to alleviate the problems that Detroit faces, which are largely having to do with a lack of taxes, because those suburbs don't increase the tax base of Detroit itself.
They're the people fleeing the problems of Detroit and leaving it to burn while they watch from next door.
It is interesting how the international view of Detroit differs from the domestic view of Detroit. Americans, as far as I can tell, view Detroit with what strikes me as hostility almost. Not all... but a lot of Americans that I have heard speak on the issue. And I say that as an American. Whereas elsewhere in the world, the view is... a bit different.
I think the "grit" brand positioning fits... since most of the brands trying to tie into Detroit are luxury. I think it will work well. But I don't think you could market many things to the average American using Brand Detroit.
Maybe cars ... that Eminem Chrysler 300 commercial was pretty good.
Just saying that the view of a Canadian, or Frenchman, or a German of Detroit will, in all likelihood, be different from the view of an American of Detroit...
Even though none of the people holding the opinions French, Canadian, German or American have actually ever visited Detroit.
For what is worth, my view of Detroit as a Spaniard was shaped by a) dangerous and violent Robocop, b) the rough play of the Dennis Rodman era's Pistons, and c) the poor and depressed world of Eminem. I don't know if younger foreigners have different references.
Americans, as far as I can tell, view Detroit with what strikes me as hostility almost.
You don't have to go far to find Canadians who view Detroit as a North American Mogadishu. Such an opinion has a strong correlation with racism, it's worth noting: Detroit must be the perilous worst because it is held to represent black America.
As to the "never actually visited", do you claim that most, or even a remote minority of Americans have "actually ever visited Detroit"? Of course they haven't. They laugh and point and repost and share the ruin porn because, ha ha, look at Detroit.
In any case, it was a pretty bizarre claim to use in response to my post given that I expressly said that I go to Detroit almost regularly. Indeed, "Canadians" in Southern Ontario almost certainly know more about Detroit than the bulk of Americans, for obvious geographical and practicality reasons.
Now maybe I'm not going to the "real" Detroit in some people's opinion, in that I am in built up urban areas and affluent suburbs, but it is a part of the whole of Detroit.
Dunno, all that separates today's Detroit from Robocop's Detroit are the robotic police units, well until they arm the drones. You have the yuppie Detroit and the rest. Doesn't look very different that some Mexican cities recently in the news, wealth on one side of the fence and the poor excluded. oh sure, they get subsidies and such, carefully factored to insure their incentive to take from those on other side of the fence doesn't occur.
Until all that urban blight is settled Detroit isn't back. This is just a game to get the bonds people and such back in the game after bankruptcy goes through.
things are definitely changing. downtown + midtown are nothing like they were just a few years ago. the neighbourhoods are another story; i'd go as far as saying they haven't been worse...
My own perspective is to not focus on how to classify Detroit's status in relation to other cities and metrics, but to focus on what Detroit is. It's an eclectic area where poverty, middle class, and affluence collide. There are creative communities that butt right up against dangerous areas. It's a great area to bike since certain times of day cars are few and far between, and there is an upbeat sense of happiness in some communities. There's not much more to it other than it's the people's town and the behavior of individuals will have a lot to do with how Detroit fares in the coming years.