You could buy two of them for the monthly cost of a nice 1-bedroom in SF.
Yup. Oakland County was once the 4th richest county in the US. Michigan leads the nation in families with second homes. Everyone around here has a second home (cottage, cabin, etc) on a lake from 1-3 hour drive away. OK, not everyone. Part of it is that there are so many lakes that they're relatively cheap. I even knew a guy who bought an entire lake - property was like 100 acres and lake was within that. This cost him less than a two bedroom place in SF.
Northern suburbs (Royal Oak) to Traverse City is 4.5 hours.
Its gotten to the point that some suburbs are big enough to develop their own suburbs. Notable Troy, South-field, Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, Sterlining Heights.
These started out as satellite cities to Detroit, but since Detroit suburbs grew, the satellite cities suburbs grew. Its just a massive sprawl.
On the other hand, one thing Detroit has that San Francisco doesn't have (or at least not to the same extent) is ready access to a lot of industry, especially automotive (even now), and the recovering Midwestern manufacturing base, in Michigan, easy access to Toledo, and feasible driving to several other industrial cities. If Detroit doesn't produce the next WhatsApp I'd guess it would be because the attraction of more business/industrial opportunities would be too great to ignore.
VC here are willing to fund a liar standing next to a hole in the ground, but lax to fund a software venture.
I live 30 minutes from detroit and come from an upper-middle class household.
See my post further up. I grew up 30 minutes in what many around here call the down river area (Riverview) and when I bought my first house, I went north. I'll happily pay more taxes for blue ribbon schools, trash pick up, snow removal, and be able to take an evening bike ride under street lights in a safe neighborhood.
Why would anyone trade any of this for living in Detroit. The bad areas are where people go who can't afford to live anywhere else. A hard cycle to break.
Also, the downtown area of Detroit is extremely nice and if the rest of it was even half as nice I would consider moving there.
You are spot-on; until it's safe to raise a family in Detroit (which, based on the lead and heavy metals residing in the soil from the torn down structures, this may never happen) I can't see myself raising a family in the city. I'll be moving to the suburbs, if I'm still living Detroit.
D3 and Loveland are doing a great job documenting the upcoming housing apocalypse - and I don't care how geneous the city gets with payment terms to the debtors, if there is no present or future income to service the debt, it's game over.
For as much building as going on in Midtown/Downtown along with the new entertainment megaplex that Illitch is constructing, there is a two factorial amount that's decaying in concrete/wood/basic raw building materials, because there is zero disposable resident income to upkeep the property.
The city will have to decompose fully to thrive. I've sometimes played with with the idea in my head to split Detroit into three or four separate cities (to help certain portions thrive), but this of course would be politically untenable.
ps - See the 'Detroit by Air' article from a few days ago.