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Comment by olsonea | Hacker News Reader

Snow is a personal preference. Boston and Detroit are comparable in terms of snowfall, the difference being there are umpteen ski resorts within a three hour drive of Boston.

I like the OP's Utopian vision for resurrecting Detroit, I had a similar idea related to other manufacturing ventures. The infrastructure should mostly still be in tact. The only thing that is missing is the industry. The perfect fit to me is the green energy industry (solar, wind manufacturing). It's the perfect opportunity to get Detroit back on it's feet, and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Throw in a tax break that both sides of the isle can live with, and there would be virtually no opposition.

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Detroit is a kleptocracy. The UAW will come in and demand you overpay your workers and (probably more importantly) impose work rules that prevent you from becoming more efficient. The city will tax you to death, since you will be the only source of revenue within the city limits.

Toyota had very good reasons for building their Prius factory in Mississippi rather than Detroit. It's a low tax, right to work state, with no historical tendency toward killing the golden goose.

Detroit is dead, and it's the fault of the people who live there. The only way to save Detroit is to fix the people. Good luck with that.

High taxes, strong unions, etc. apply to places like Massachusetts and California as well, and they don't seem to have the same kind of troubles Detroit has.

I'd chalk most of Detroit's problems up to the post-industrial malaise that affected Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, Gary, etc. as well, i.e. cities built around industrial-age factory sectors that turned out to have their eggs in the wrong baskets for the 21st century. Factory towns in right-to-work states didn't generally weather the transition any better-- South Carolina is littered with ghost towns that were formerly supported by the textile mills, and the state's economy never really recovered from their departure (it's now the country's fourth-poorest state, worse off than Michigan).

Other than the fact that if nobody lives in Detroit and nobody wants to live in Detroit, the last place we should want industry is Detroit. What makes sense is for industry to be built where people want to live. That apparently means not Michigan, and generally, not in the north. (Migration in the U.S. goes generally from the north to the south.)

Claims about the infrastructure are unconvincing. If the infrastructure is sufficiently intact and if that's an actual plus so that it's worth starting a business there, then businesses would be started there. Or is the market being inefficient, and you with your oh-so-wise opinion of how things should be know better than the people who would stand to make money off of being right about your suppositions?

Here's a better idea: Let's help Cambodia get back on its feet by subsidizing its industry, they would benefit more per dollar than people living in Michigan.

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