Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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, they all have great local resources, but these are all, culturally, working class blue collar cities, and there is really nothing wrong with that. These cities ought to do better to embrace that identity.
I'm from Cleveland. The city was fighting hard against the impending collapse by building out the Rock Hall, rebuilding the Browns stadium and discouraging the Dog Pound, along with and other things to make it more like a major city, ripping out the soul along the way. When LTV steel went under, the dominoes fell one after another, which destroyed the day and night life of the flats.1
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. 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.
Anecdotal, but the average quote I got for electricians in the bay area was $200/hour. This is also consistent for electricians in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago (just had a friend recently get work done at that price). I recently paid $2k to get a transmission done, of which $1700 was labor alone (took 3 days).
Point is - these trades are no joke when it comes to earning income, especially if you're talented.
I'm a serious proponent of promoting vocational jobs. Even in an "AI world" you're still going to need mechanics. Basically anything with moving parts needs labor.
If it took a full 3 days that's 24 hours of work, or around $70/hour, probably half of that went to the employee which gives him around $70K/year salary, not much in the bay area.
I should have clarified. It took 3 days end to end. It's unlikely the actual labor was 24 hours (the tech even admitted that once they take the transmission apart they have to let it soak in lubricant).
> rent, utilities, general supplies, insurance, etc.
Of course. But as you can probably imagine, most auto shops skimp on those costs as much as possible. The point is, a developer charging $200/hr (even remote) for their time is also paying for insurance, workspace, computer, internet connection, etc.
Less skilled factory work would generate wealth, but unfortunately those are the exact jobs that left.
Electricians, Plumbers, Roofers, Drywallers, auto-motive repair to some degree, are the one who actually create/repair/restore the only physical infrastructure that actually matters. My Twitter, Facebook, Instagram could all disappear, and it would probably have no (real) impact on me. But take away electricity, water, roof, walls, transportation - I'll notice within a few minutes.
In my mind, those are the people who create real wealth.
Edit: After seeing the downvotes on the parent post, and a couple similar ones, I think people are reading "creating wealth" vs. "not creating wealth" as value judgements on the people in those industries. Whereas in this context I think they mean in the purely economic / accounting sense, similar to "cost centers" and "profit centers" in businesses. Without profit centers, the business would crumble, but without the value that the cost centers bring to the business, the profit centers wouldn't be able to function.
So just like Silicon Valley needs to find a way to not price service workers (janitors, mechanics, etc) out of the area, other places need the same healthy balance of money flowing into the area along with a local economy to distribute that money around.
Repairmen very directly create wealth by adding value to the thing they repair, equivalent to a craft trade or construction. Realtors create wealth indirectly by increasing/facilitating trade, trade creates wealth.
If car built in a factory is useful for 10 years without repairs, but useful for 30 years with repairs, the mechanics add 20 years of useful life to the car. Does that not increase wealth?
> Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth.[0]
Having said all that, I'll be very angry with myself if my future children graduate high school thinking that college is the only next step that would make their loved ones proud, like it was for me and my friends.
How many tradesmen are self-employed? I think business-owning plumbers would be equivalent to consultants in the software world, and their billed income (per hour) is way above average for the field.
A while back I needed some sprinkler work done.. normally I would have attempted it myself but due to health issues I can't do it anymore... and the lowest cost gardener was $200 for 30 minutes worth of work. There is still money in the blue collar trades for someone willing to run a business.
I think about this when people post about how you don;t really need a college degree, you just need a trade. I have no doubt that some tradesmen do very well but I doubt they represent the entire class of workers.
I do wonder what the numbers would look like if trained tradesmen (and women) were compared based on time spent learning (e.g. years of apprenticeship vs. years of college.)
As all of these cities aptly demonstrate, plumbing and auto mechanic jobs aren't a panacea for disappearing factory jobs.
Specifically, if more folks were trying to follow this advice, it would begin to fail in predictable ways.
We've made these jobs seem "dirty" and low class when they're not.
If you're a welder you'll get a very good starting wage, and while it will never hit stratospheric levels, the upper end when you you've had years of experience and have worked to increase your qualifications can be extraordinarily generous.
I know two highly qualified welders that work on oil plant equipment and they make so much money they can afford to take half the year off to do whatever they want. You don't want random idiots welding pipes in a billion dollar plant, and you need to pay for that kind of talent.
Consider: Tech workers often get paid very well, but I don't know of many that get overtime.
For example the requirements to go on my technician course in the UK back in the day required 6 O levels (exams taken at 16) for the Bank only 4. Ok it was a specialized for the local industry themo fluids one.
When enough people realize just how much of it is smoke and mirrors, I think the common snobbery towards those "dirty" jobs would dissipate. Right now, it's self-reinforcing, because being "better than those guys" is part of white collar identity, regardless of pay. It reminds me of the racial arrangement in Jim Crow South, where even the most poor whites would find solace in that they're not on the lowest rung of the social ladder.
Also this would require employers to commit to training in away they will not want to do and because of the one size fits all they would have to pay for a generic learn the needed skills and knowledge.
> "Nowadays, "working-class, blue-collar" stuff does not make money`" is just flat out wrong. That line of thinking is a major contributing factor to the shortage of labor in blue collar fields, along with mass amounts of young adults with crippling college debt.
The core problem is, ultimately, the customer base is led by the white collar jobs who lack the skills to perform those tasks.
The blue collar tradesmen, frankly, has the skills to avoid buying services from each other. I know a mechanic that does her own plumbing, electrical, etc. She'd never try to make money at it but to the best of my knowledge the only time she hired anyone was to get the HVAC installed. That was largely a size/experience issue with a crane to move it into her backyard over the fence.
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 theory seems to have held out in the Indian/Chinese labor markets; but its possible there are other systemic reason for that.
Meanwhile the demand for Technology skills keeps increasing rapidly. Perhaps in the next economic bust there will be a much-delayed correction. The future does look pretty rosy for Software Engineers at the present time.
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.
Obviously that dream was not widely realized, but there are some employers that will allow you to write code from the countryside.
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, there just isn't much to make these cities attractive for new industries, except maybe cheap real estate, but you can get that in many other places in the US while not being burdened by 1) terrible weather and 2) crumbling old infrastructure that's going to cost a fortune to modernize. I think these cities can reinvent themselves to a degree, taking advantage of the many old buildings and such, but I don't think they'll ever get back to the population levels and economic statuses they had in the past, just like Rome is probably never going to be the leading city in Europe again.
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.
For those unfamiliar, the Cuyahoga river which flows through Ohio was so polluted at various points that it caught on fire 10+ times. The fires were one of the catalysts for the environmental movement.
Big corporate players are noticing the trend and playing the long game. There's a reason why Michigan and Wisconsin have crippled collective bargaining and imposed restrictive voter-ID measures.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/29/nestle-pays-...
This is, in all practical matters, incorrect for Michigan. See the following, directly from the relevant authority's website:
"Michigan does have a voter identification requirement at the polls. Voters are asked to present an acceptable photo ID such as a Michigan driver's license or identification card. Please note that voters who do not have an acceptable form of ID or failed to bring it with them to the polls still can vote. They simply sign a brief affidavit stating that they're not in possession of a photo ID. Their ballots are included with all others and counted on Election Day."
https://www.michigan.gov/sos/0,4670,7-127-29836-202520--F,00...
I lived in the state for years and met many people who never showed acceptable ID to vote.
I'd be fine with Nestle paying a whole lot more for the permit (because bottled water is dumb), but the value of the water they are extracting isn't even that high, so if you made them pay high prices and used all the money improving municipal water systems, it wouldn't make much difference.
I'm guessing that if you want to predict a city's ability to transform to a haven for new industries (like tech), you need to look at how much of a college town it is. Carnegie Mellon is a top-ranked private university with 13,500 students (so not a tiny place), and just one of many large universities there. They also have a lot of nice cultural stuff there, largely thanks to Mr. Carnegie, such as the museums. Most other rust-belt cities can't boast these features. Cleveland has CWRU (11,300 students), but I can't think of a whole lot of academia in cities like Detroit, Buffalo, and definitely not Toledo or Flint.
Detroit has the University of Michigan with 44,700 students nearby (about the same distance as my unfortunately long commute). Buffalo has the University of Buffalo with 30,600 students. Both universities are among the largest employers in their metro areas.
Both metros have tried to diversify their economies, as have Pittsburgh and Cleveland. The health care industry is a large source of jobs for all of them.
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).
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 and full of young people trying to do new stuff.
A big reason is that Ferndale was very cheap to live in, and while it's come up a lot it's still a lot cheaper than Ann Arbor (and a lot of other parts of Michigan.)
To the GP's comments, Detroit has done a lot to come up in the world on its own, though I'm not sure I like the idea of Ford buying the old train station, nor am I entirely in love with the $2~3000/mo apartments in midtown and I kinda wish it still had more of its grunge pricing to go with the definite grunge feeling that still lingers...
To argue more specifically with the parent's point, the statistical area certainly counts Ann Arbor, and that count is no less reasonable than Oakland being counted with SF. Commute times from Ann Arbor <-> the rest of Metro Detroit are entirely reasonable compared to the rest of the major cities in the country. Whether you're willing to accept any commute longer than walking across the street is a personal decision, clearly a significant fraction of the population will accept it.
Detroit—Warren—Dearborn, MI and Ann Arbor, MI are separate MSAs in the Detroit—Warren—Ann Arbor, MI CSA.
This means that while there are some interlocking commuting patterns between Detroit and Ann Arbor, they are much weaker than the commuting patterns within a single MSA.
On the contrary, Oakland is part of the same MSA as SF: San Francisco—Oakland—Hayward, CA. Though most of what was traditionally considered SV is in a separate MSA: San Jose—Sunnyvale—Santa Clara, CA. And both are part of the San Jose—San Francisco—Oakland, CA CSA.
Sorry, I'm something of a census nerd, and I even built a site using machine-parsed census data just so I could drill down to various levels.
Some links:
http://zaidan-x.org:8192/csa/220 (Detroit)
I mostly mean that in the following sense: due to some historical Michigan laws, the "City of Detroit" is vastly poorer than, say, Houston. However, the actually equivalent comparison due to Houston's absorbing its own suburbs over the last hundred years is to Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties. This does eliminate Washtenaw County that Ann Arbor is in, but the idea is that the "Detroit Metropolitan Region" is actually not on hard times and hasn't been any more so than any other major city in a very long time. It's just that no one wants to pay Detroit city income taxes, so they live literally across the street in Ferndale or Dearborn. Or, like me, they suck it up and commute from Ann Arbor so that they live somewhere with lower crime, but the job still counts as that region.
I wouldn't say "mostly." It's mostly due to huge numbers of job moving to or being created downtown by Dan Gilbert's umbrella of companies(mostly Quicken Loans). Additionally, many businesses in metro detroit are moving from the suburbs to downtown.
I'm not so sure Detroit is any cheaper than Ann Arbor these days, either. At least not in the downtown & midtown areas.
The part of Ferndale my good friends live in is still much cheaper than Ann Arbor even though it's about 3x more than it cost ~5 years ago.
Your point about Ann Arbor relative to Detroit is spot on. Detroit doesn't really have UofM. It has Wayne State, but neither UofM or Michigan State can be claimed by 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 graduates are even lower, since moving away from family has become more common, but I couldn't find data.
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
Detroit has Wayne State University which is growing with the addition of a new business school courtesy of the late Mike Ilitch the founder of Little Caesars.
https://ilitchbusiness.wayne.edu/
There are also two smaller colleges, Marygrove and University of Detroit Mercy.
It's noteworthy that, beyond UofM's 50,000 students, the population of A2 is no more than 100K. That just isn't enough to draw large employers (like the Amazon HQ2) or gestate explosive growth. Thus job prospects aren't likely to boom in A2, ever, nor will A2 (or UofM) play a significant role in driving Detroit's renaissance.
I don't really see AA doing that much better than, say, Madison Wi. Which, I'm sure most would agree, is a comparable town. If anything, places like Madison and Champaign in Illinois are doing a bit better. (Well, more population growth anyway.)
I suspect not even the heirs and heiresses of Detroit's tycoons are willing to shuttle daily from A2 into Detroit proper.
I find that pretty pretentious.
And the problem with it is that it makes the situation out to be one purely of aesthetic and moral preferences, completely ignoring ecomonic factors that can't be simply chosen based on such preferences.
The third indicates education helps a lot. But, you restrict yourself to basically adult education. To keep people somewhere, you need not to just convince them it is a place they can thrive, but that their kids could, too.
Fourth, I don't know. You reference the soul of a city, but give little extra thought to that and move on.
Your last paragraph, though, just loses me. You use obviously negative rhetoric to describe what you think of most currently succeeding cities. It is the obviously negative tone that annoys me. Your second sentence is one I can agree with. The first just doesn't belong next to it. You want me to accept one lifestyle while simultaneously being willing to reject another. Or, at least, be ok with it being rejected.
I'm from Toledo and left for SF without looking back. I begged people in the SBA and business community to discuss tech with me and they didn't get it and I'd be shocked if they get it now. It was literally like "How can you make money with a website?" and this was just 8 years ago. Forget about using open source as they're all about MS and Oracle and corporate BS. Friends and family from that area are still totally shocked by things like pets and alcohol in the office, working from home, wearing t-shirts/jeans/tennis shoes, standing desks etc... It's really a shit mentality and it will persist for some time.
It would take an obscene amount of money for me to move back to Toledo and almost everyone I love is there.
The median age feels like it continues to rise as young people leave more and more.
I think this is a little too simplistic. I used this reason partially to not leave one of the cities on your list for many years. Working in software and not wanting to be part of the "brain drain". Eventually, I realized the problem was simply bigger than me and that finding quality tech work and companies was something I needed for personal health (both career and other).
Yes. It seems like every mid-sized city has a large university. Regardless, most of the better paying jobs in the country are, over time, becoming concentrated in only a handful of places.
> 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.
Not everyone in NYC or LA or Boston want to stare at a computer either. A lot of them can and do go to bars to drink cheap beer and watch football.
> There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter.
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.
Yes, middle america is downtrodden. However, a lot of what is presented as well meaning discourse is actually nefarious in nature.
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."
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.
just say neigh to screaming at sports events until you are hoarse.
Sad. Equally sad is: that's also happening in cities that are enjoying The Best of Times. A lot of the people doing the actual work can't afford to live in them ... even if their neighborhoods weren't being gentrified into sterility.
Property investors want a high return on their rentals. But no spreadsheets can calculate the hidden cost of that return. When there's nothing left for greed to monetize, the day of reckoning will arrive.
It'll probably look like 'I Am Legend'.
But you know what? Cool kids with "soul" typically don't bring in a whole lot of money. Add to that the fact that a lot of their "soul" is coming from a place of some very real pain, and you can see the potential for issues. So, yes, cities want to keep their "soul", and that's fine. (That's actually a GOOD thing.)
But let's look at it face on, and not romanticize what that "soul" is too much. "Soul" makes cities what they are. No question. But it can have a dark side too. Just as the gleaming tech economy startups have a dark side that we shouldn't be romanticizing too much.
Not only is this a non-sequitir from the previous paragraph, but drinking beer (cheap is relative) and screaming at a television is a tradition shared by people of every economic and social class in the US. Furthermore, no policy has impinged on or repressed anyone's right or ability to do that, and nobody is forcing people to drink expensive coffee or eat farm-to-table food.
Also, computers screens a reality of work in a developed economy. People working in modern industrial facilities have to operate sophisticated machinery, and that often involves computers screens, in jobs that have nothing to do with programming. I have family that manage aircraft maintenance teams in the military, and they spend a lot of time in front of screens, because it's the best tool for aspects of the job.
> There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter.
The only people attacking straight-marriage are libertarians like Ron Paul, who don't think government should be recognizing _any_ marriages, so this statement goes beyond a straw-man, and straight into dog-whistle territory.
From looking at my FB feed, I've mostly surmised that computer gaming is largely a passtime for people with blue collar lives.
So you're wrong on one of these.
And FWIW, even though I'm at ground zero for Boston's hipster influx, I'm still a short walk from a lot of places where you can drink cheap beer and yell at a TV showing sportsball.
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 offer a theory, I'd say 2008-2011 prematurely drove out people who would otherwise have left more gradually.)
I also noticed the line "Dreams of a house for a few thousand dollars seem like an old memory in some areas, where buildings can list for more than a million." The phrasing is circumspect; it carefully avoids saying that there are actually specific areas where home prices have gone from thousands to a million, and equivocates oddly between houses and buildings. Detroit was never all impoverished, and I have a sinking feeling that this sentence is comparing the current prices of Downtown Detroit to the past prices of northeast Detroit.
Certainly there are some bright spots in Detroit, the city's budget is less disastrous and the projects in bulldozing, resettlement, and urban forestry are a fascinating experiment. But all the evidence I can see says that a plan for Detroit which depends on a rising population anytime soon is basically doomed, whatever the changing look of the city.
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?
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.
On the other hand, an article like this can contribute to the hoped-for revival. The media has considerable power. It seems ungenerous to criticise them when they use it for good, manufactured narrative or not.
There’s also the issue of why would they do this good versus another. Is this the neediest city? What evidence do they use to target their good? Most charities and government have controls in place to focus this. If news goes against their charter to try to improve social good, what mechanism do they have to measure this? The NYTimes is a BCorp. They aren’t a charity with a board.
Meanwhile, we'll keep working on it. For example, pretty much all of us understand that Detroit needs to decrease in physical size. That's already underway. Statistics don't really account for something like that. The foodie neighborhoods where a SoMa resident would feel at home? Can't really capture those effectively in stats, either. How blocks of what used to be abandoned buildings are now yielding economic crops? On, and on.
You don't snap your fingers and reinvent a city overnight. I left, then left SV to return. Interpret that accordingly.
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 coming revitalization since I was 10, but without exception the result has been a huge, unrewarding investment to create one new shopping complex or clean up and develop a yuppie-friendly block of apartments and restaurants. It's an approach that gentrified Hell's Kitchen and the Combat Zone, but it's a complete loss without a desirable city encircling the spot under development.
I don't just want Detroit to succeed for it's own sake, although that's obviously a big deal to a lot of people. I want Detroit to be a flagship for Cleveland and Gary and Buffalo and Pittsburgh and all the other places that never seem to make good on their potential. And in the long run, for Japan, Serbia, Ukraine, and so on. This isn't a unique problem, and we need a plan for healthy shrinking of cities and countries.
I want so badly for Detroit to succeed. The downtown revitalizations are admirable, Hantz Woodlands is one of the coolest urban design projects I've seen in years, there's so much being tried. But when I read an article about how Detroit is reviving because housing prices are high, and the real turnaround will come when the population starts growing again? It sounds like my hometown, all willful blindness and attempts to dive straight back into the broken development patterns that got us here in the first place.
We need something better than that.
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.
Thanks for the suggestion. How do you measure improvement in racial inequality? Detroit has a really robust open data portal at https://data.detroitmi.gov/browse?category=Government with lots of data on education and health. But I don’t see any with race / ethnicity.
There must be some way to use statistics to capture improvements. There are quite a few statistical models and other cities are able to show quantifiable evidence.
There’s the Resilient Cities initiative - https://www.100resilientcities.org/
There’s also lots of stats used by businesses to relocate and invest in cities. Certainly it’s not possible to reinvent cities overnight, but Detroit has been in recovery for quite a long while and there must be some metrics that are being targeted.
But the article mentions none.
The actual change here is "Detroit had a net gain of 12 startups over three years".
That, and the comparable stat for Michigan as a whole, are the only growth numbers actually present in the article. And even the author rightly admits that we're talking about a tiny starting number. Remember that XKCD about rapid growth and small populations? (https://xkcd.com/1102/) To be a bit cynical, this looks like a submarine piece for the Michigan Venture Capital Association, which is the source for 100% of the article's data, including the filler stuff about investment sectors that adds more statistics without advancing the actual growth thesis.
For years of going there for work it was tough to find locally owned restaurants in favor of chains, it’s do-able but you might end up in weird places like a polish restaurant literally in the basement of a house a few blocks off Woodward.
The people who identify with Detroit really do so. There is at first an inexplicable pride of being “from the D”, but it’s nice, there are really diverse art scenes, I’ve had great food, and really most people are quite friendly for being eastern half of the country.
It’s an odd place.
I've lived in Michigan 30 years now. Came here for grad school, first at MSU, then down to Wayne State for Ph.D. Never left.
There is something about this place. Even when we are getting the crap kicked out of us ... we don't give up.
It took a long time to get rid of most of the corrupt city management. Some are still there, and the city council are generally throwbacks to the bad time.
Detroit school system is still ... crap. Private and charter schooling is doing a great job of fixing that, giving parents a choice, and forcing the schools to compete for students. This helps.
There are many other anachronisms throughout the region and state. Some of these are quaint, some of them are incredibly frustrating, off putting, etc.
If we could only attract more money to the area, this would be a great place to form small companies seeking to be large companies. Low burn rates/costs. Lots of talent that wants to escape the autos, and other failed regional initiatives (life science corridor anyone?). Ann Arbor has a nascent/tiny startup scene. Should be bigger.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/detroitmarios/
[2] http://www.xochimilcorestaurant.com/
Free private schools?
If not they are giving parents that can afford it a choice. Just like wealthy expats tend to place their kids in good private schools in poor places because they can afford it.
As long as education isn't good for everybody it's just another way to stack the deck.
Charter schools aren't private though. Bad ones are closed, bad teachers are fired at running schools.
Quite a number of kids come from 15+ miles away to this school, driven there and back by parents daily. They come from school districts which have not been demonstrating successful outcomes, either in terms of retention, or successfully preparing kids for life after school (college, trade/vocational school, etc.)
This said, while it is a college prep school, it isn't a silver bullet. Kids parents need to be engaged and involved. They can't be helicopter parents. Most are though.
This isn't an identity or socioeconomic issue. Kids families in this school range from nearly homeless through extremely wealthy. The school will be good for those who wish to engage. For those who don't and simply want a babysitting service, maybe not so good.
My brother and I had rough lives there, assaults, hate crime, etc. I made sure to settle in a better place now that I have a family.
Tell us what you practiced.
To be honest the gap between public schools in good ISD and charters is in the eye of beholder and mostly subjective.
To add to it, Jeff's Kitchen was some legit authentic Chinese food. Need to order ahead of time, it's that legit, they need to get water spinach from some market a day or two before you want to it.
That's exactly how I felt living in Baltimore. Now that I live in New York, everyone and everything seems so normal, but in a dull kind of way. America's downtrodden and resurgent smaller cities have a lot going for them in terms of culture, character, the resiliency of their people. I really hope they can find some measure of economic success.
1) Both independent cities. There are only a few in the entire country. St. Louis and Baltimore are the two largest. This dynamic plays out in very similar ways in both cities. I hang out on r/baltimore a bit. The people there use the terms "City" and "County" almost exactly as we do.
2) Similar demographics, crime rates, and issues. Detroit is down to about 10% white. The splits in Baltimore and St. Louis are more even, which informs quite a bit of the racial politics in each city. (I can't imagine there's much of a white voting bloc left in Detroit, but it still makes a big difference in St. Louis and Baltimore.)
3) Very similar population peaks. St. Louis peaked at ~850k. Baltimore once had about 950k. Detroit was much, much larger at its peak.
4) The Baltimore Orioles used to be the St. Louis Browns.
5) Similar architectural patterns. Where Baltimore has row houses:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/55/7e/11/557e11d75dd3b45ed3ef...
St. Louis has red brick:
https://misfitstream.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/25.jpg
The prevalence of each form creates very similar vibes in each city. Detroit doesn't seem to have any such dominant form.
6) Detroit's boom (driven by the automobile) came later than either Baltimore's or St. Louis's. Baltimore and St. Louis are much more from the same, earlier era and that definitely comes through when walking around in their older neighborhoods.
I think there's a really fine line though between a city like Baltimore and one like Buffalo, where I did live for a few years and revisited after a decade absent.
Buffalo seems to try to redevelop a neighborhood, but after not finding the success they hoped for will abandon that neighborhood and move on to try another.
When I was first in Buffalo in the early 2000s it was downtrodden but had promise, but my visit there last summer was incredibly depressing.
This is the most bullish thing you can say. An odd place is special vs. the rest of generica.
From an ISP perspective: very sparsely populated areas are also going to see the cable TV company (DOCSIS3.0 or DOCSIS3.1 based cablemodem internet) and POTS/Copper phone line ILEC (ADSL2+, VDSL2) ISPs abandon or neglect their infrastructure. It does not make economic sense to maintain an aerial coaxial cable plant and DOCSIS3.0 CMTS systems throughout a region of a city that has only a few houses per block. Expect to be required to DIY your own internet as well.
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.
http://www.dailydetroit.com/2017/05/25/detroit-continues-los...
(2016 appears to be the last year census data is available.)
What's interesting about the handful of Victorian restorations is that there are large apartment buildings behind built around them, sometimes directly adjacent.
When they were being restored there were green vacant lots around, within a couple of years they could be in the shadow of the new buildings.
In walking through the neighborhood, I wondered if I'd move back there. I doubt it. It's still a bizarre city where there is very little downtown shopping, eerily quiet to walk around, almost no grocery stores. With the new bars and restaurants popping up, everyone said they wanted to live there, no-one I knew actually did it.
A former colleague from decades ago runs it, so I visited it late last year. I was really impressed. They are very interested in enabling all sort of entrepreneurship in Detroit, including that of the tech kind.
For personal reasons, I'm pretty tied to San Francisco. But if I were starting a new business, I'd look hard at Detroit. In 1998, SF/SV was the heart of something new and different. But the Internet's success over the last 20 years means that much of what was then specialized local knowledge is now available everywhere.
Michigan's universities produce a steady stream of graduates; UMich Ann Arbor's CS program is well ranked. For hiring established talent, being able to actually afford a house is a big draw, and for those not tempted remote work is getting ever easier. There's plenty of educated non-tech labor; you could open a customer service center there or in one of many medium-sized towns nearby for prices that seem ridiculously low.
I think the only real drawback is that the shiniest VCs seem very reluctant to invest in companies that aren't in shiny places. But given what a devil's bargain VC money is, and given how much of it goes right into shiny-place prices, I suspect that many could have better odds of long-term success by taking money with a local or long-term focus.
Detroit is spectacular for many reasons. We have retained and nurtured our resources from before the decline such as our art museum, libraries and ISPs (not the consumer ones). In the midst of our decline for some reason downtown detroit developed some kind of renaissance, despite the decline people decided to cling harder to things like the eastern market, architecture, and art. We are full of things like artistic movie theaters, plays, public displays, interesting cuisine, and startups. Yet you will not find a theater showing avengers, or a traditional supermarket until you get to around dearborn. There are also many quirks in the worse parts of Deteoit, a huge spread of people instead of concentrations, and many people taking what we have left behind to make something. I have visited every major city in the US outside of california and New York and I have never seen anything like detroit. We have somehow through disparity been blessed with the ability to be almost meritocratic, the amount of opportunities and equality In have experienced coming from a lower class, and the genuine people that remain is what I imagine to be higher than other cities. Anecdotally of course.
I would certainly say there is definite momentum in Detroit but I'd like to see additional angel funding / 1MM+ Series A rounds before I would use the word 'exploding' to describe the tech scene.
Second - there are some very interesting software problems that the Tier 1 suppliers (Delphi/Magna/AAM/etc.) are working on but you never hear about it. Generally working for a tier 1 supplier sucks (suppliers are always subservient to the OEMs) but you there's nothing quite like getting your hands dirty in bringing together the real world and code.
For that same reason, I've always regretted not having money to buy real state in Detroit. No matter how bad things are, a city this big is bound to rebound sooner or later. I wonder how long it will take before "Detroit gentrification" becomes a thing.
There's a reason no one is clamoring to buy land in Somalia.
The city limits of Detroit proper encompass about 143 square miles.
While it's not that large of a city compared to others, you can fit the cities of San Francisco (46.7 sq miles), Boston (89.6 sq miles), and Manhattan (22.8 sq miles) within Detroit city limits.
While you process that, the 2017 population of Detroit is about 672,000 people, compared to the 3.12 million people who live in SF(860k), Boston (618k), and Manhattan (1.64M)
While it's growing for sure, if you get off the highway you'll see really fast that Detroit is still a ghost town.
There are entire neighborhoods/subdivisions with streets lined with houses except all of those houses have been abandoned. For DECADES. It's like the Walking Dead minus the zombies.
I'm psyched for Detroit (I grew up in the Detroit suburbs) and am rooting hard for it's recovery. With that said... the city of Detroit has lost 61% of it's population since it's peak in the 1950s.
61 PERCENT! While I remain optimistic, I'm also realistic. I'm psyched that Detroit is on an upswing, but there's a long way up to go.
Sure, but Boston is only a part of what people think of as Boston. When Paul Graham talked about Boston in "Cities and Ambition", he meant Cambridge.
If you add the cities and towns with a T stop:
- Boston (89.6) - Cambridge (7.13) - Somerville (4.2) - Quincy (26.87) - Malden (5.1) - Revere (5.9) - Braintree (14.5) - Brookline (6.8)
...you have a 'city' encompassing 160 sq mi, which is bigger than Detroit.
That standard doesn't generalize -- I grew up in the DC area, and the metro there goes all the way out to Rockville, which is generally considered to be an exurb, practically flyover country. (IMO, that's an unfair assessment, but it is what it is.) But it seems about right for Boston.
Does Detroit have central parts that aren't part of the city proper, the way Boston has Cambridge and Somerville and San Francisco has Berkeley and Oakland?
I swore for years I would never go back to my hometown, and I just bought a (still cheap, thankfully) condo there (although not as my primary residence). It’s much better than it ever has been in my lifetime (I’m 35).
Feel free to take a view of a summer night in Detroit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztGzzvchcUQ
Until Detroit can carve out car-free zones that attract hip daytime hangouts that combine residential with retail, its urban costs will continue to outweigh its urban charm.
On a modern Android phone, I can't see all of the article text, with an undetermined amount being cut off at the bottom. Swipe back doesn't work if you don't start the swipe from the center of the page (which is unnatural and not the same for swiping forward). There are no obvious affordances to indicate that tapping on the left brings me back. And an un-dismissible subscription dialog appears, obscuring almost all remaining text.
I'm just assuming that it renders perfectly for iPhones. Serious question: is testing for Android just not done?
Everyone is convinced of their ideas of what Detroit needs but I really think it needs to have some new industries and an economy that is diverse enough to support it in tough times.The problem is the only real industry to bring the kind of wealth the city was used to in the mid 20th century would be the tech industry and the Midwest is a bit too homey to be the next SV. People here deep down are still weary of sitting in front of a tube all day.