Will The Last Person To Leave Detroit Please Turn Out The Lights?

March 21, 2007 8:59 AM

The city of Detroit is in a bad way. House are cheaper than cars. The city's neighborhoods are in decay. Families are leaving. Even "revived" areas are struggling. Entire portions of the city are starting to revert to prarie and ruins. Can the city be saved or is it time to give up on the Arsenal of Democracy?
posted by fancypants (220 comments total)

Detroit is where I grew up, and I lived in the city and attended its public schools from age 5 to age 18. Someday I'd like to come home to it, but at this point I'm at a loss as to what can be done to stop the bleeding that's been going on since the 1960s. (This is my first post to the blue, so be gentle)
posted by fancypants at 9:04 AM on March 21, 2007

Where else would Robocop battle ED-209 if Detroit doesn't decay more to the point where it will be revitalized by an evil private monolith?
posted by Burhanistan at 9:05 AM on March 21, 2007 [7 favorites]

.
posted by funkbrain at 9:08 AM on March 21, 2007

It's also being attacked by beetles.
posted by nekton at 9:08 AM on March 21, 2007

You know, in the end a smaller, more manageable Detroit with lots of greenspace may emerge from this; that wouldn't necessarily be such a bad thing. It's high time Detroit got itself a new identity; the Motor City days are gone forever. Why not be the Green City or something?

And where are all the people going? Chicago?
posted by Mister_A at 9:09 AM on March 21, 2007

How are things in Windsor?
posted by srboisvert at 9:11 AM on March 21, 2007

"I'll buy that for a dollar."

No, seriously. That little bungalow over there. I'll give you a dollar. I think it's the best offer you might get.
posted by MasonDixon at 9:11 AM on March 21, 2007 [2 favorites]

I live in one of the northeast suburbs of Detroit, work doing IT for an auto company, and I'm actively looking to get out of the area. With the auto industry collapsing and all employment here no more than one step away from auto stuffs I think it's a good time to leave.

While I like Michigan (it's got just about everything one could want to do) it no longer feels possible to work, live, and feel that there will be enough economic opportunity to earn enough to eventually retire.
posted by c0nsumer at 9:11 AM on March 21, 2007

I personally have relocated to Chicago, but I think a lot of the movement out of Detroit is still to the surrounding suburbs. First it was the white population and now the middle class black families are fleeing the city in droves.
posted by fancypants at 9:12 AM on March 21, 2007

The $29k houses are "regular" houses. I've heard of houses going for as low as $4k in detroit.

The poor areas of detroit seem like an entirely diffrent country, like nowhere else on earth. In other poor places in the world, people have never been wealthy. Here you see poverty in a place that used to be wealthy. It's very strange.
posted by delmoi at 9:13 AM on March 21, 2007

yeah.. it's in a bad way. but as a resident i feel that finally the rate of decay might finally be slowing. (our second derivative is positive?)
posted by ofthestrait at 9:17 AM on March 21, 2007

I was thinking the same thing Mister_A. Perhaps Detroit can pare itself down and become a verdant and beautiful city.

But it will take a long while and lots of capital investment. It's the latter that causes so many problems. Who wants to put money into landscaping? It has to come from city government. And as they're not getting any money from property taxes, that's a tall order.

And what of the people? Though in decay, people still live in the ruinous areas of the city. They can't simply be evicted. Then again, that's exactly what Daley did in the housing projects of Chicago, but that's a different story.

Detroit's problem is that it remains a one industry town. All of its eggs are in a single basket. A basket that was really good for a long time, but that has since fallen apart. Other cities in the Midwest have suffered similarly, at least to some extent.

Chicago managed to survive - and for the first time since 1950, to actually grow - by diversifying. The stockyards and grain elevators that built the city disappeared decades ago. They've been replaced by advertising firms, financial services, and consulting agencies. Detroit has to figure out a way to do the same.
posted by aladfar at 9:19 AM on March 21, 2007

Sounds to me like what they need is a take-no-shit mayor like Rudy G. to come in there and clean the town up. I'm no expert on Detroit, and most of my knowledge comes from a friend who moved to Dallas from Detroit. According to him, once the jobs started going, there was no reason to stay in Detroit. And with the absurd about of crime and trash running down the city, there was a good reason to leave. You could get people to put up with it when there are jobs, but they aren't going to do it for the hell of it. So sounds to me like you need to get a Mayor who will crack down on the city hard and clean it up, and who isn't afraid of political ramifications for tough decisions. Once the city is cleaned up, the people might be willing to return, and if the people return, the jobs will too. Then again, I could be way off-base since I am relying on one person's assessment, and that guy clearly has significant judgment problems seeing as how he is convinced that the Pistons could beat the Mavs in a 7 game series.
posted by dios at 9:20 AM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

I grew up (and live) in West Michigan. What needs to happen is that Michigan as an entire community needs to step up to the plate and take responsibility for Detroit. Until that happens, the city will continue to face decline.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 9:20 AM on March 21, 2007 [2 favorites]

I'm not going to pretend that I'm doing anything more then idle speculation, but it seems to me that a lot of urban centres in the US are going to see a lot of reorganization in the near future, when suburban sprawl begins to implode.

Detroit seems to be in an otherwise great location as far as agriculture is concerned. With no money (investment or liquid) actually left in the city, it might be prime for radical approaches and experiments in low-impact sustainability.

Wow that's optimistic and naive. How do I even survive?
posted by Alex404 at 9:23 AM on March 21, 2007

Just to be clear, dios, is "Rudy G." Giuliani?

But yeah, "cracking down" on poverty should clean it right up. Get those who are willing to work busy building debtor's prisons, say I!
posted by DU at 9:24 AM on March 21, 2007

Oh, and Mister_A and aladfar are one step ahead of me.

I'm still twice as optimistic though.
posted by Alex404 at 9:25 AM on March 21, 2007

There's been a lot of talk of starting some kind of farming in Detroit, but unfortunately a lot of the land is really polluted with heavy metals and the like because of the city's industrial history. Stuff like that can be remediated, but again, it takes money. It's a vicious cycle.
posted by fancypants at 9:26 AM on March 21, 2007

that's part of the reason that the downtown/midtown appears to be doing well, alex404.. aside from royal oak and ferndale there's really nowhere in the metro detroit area to experience walkable urban living, and i think the success of developments downtown speaks to a frustration with the suburban lifestyle.

Unfortunately, the worst areas of Detroit are in the neighborhoods between downtown and the first-ring suburbs, where new development and economic opportunity is basically nonexistent.
posted by ofthestrait at 9:27 AM on March 21, 2007

They should merge Detroit and Toledo and call it "Deledo."
posted by Floydd at 9:29 AM on March 21, 2007 [7 favorites]

Let's blame the auto unions! and next, the teachers unions.
posted by Postroad at 9:35 AM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

> Perhaps Detroit can pare itself down and become a verdant and beautiful city. But it
> will take a long while and lots of capital investment. It's the latter that causes so many
> problems. Who wants to put money into landscaping?

Trees and grass grow all by themselves, if people don't go out of their way to bulldoze them.
posted by jfuller at 9:43 AM on March 21, 2007

I too grew up in Detroit. I attended Detroit Public Schools (sampson, Bates Academy, Cass Tech) until I was 16. It was obvious to me then that I had to get out of there if I wanted to get a proper education and be in a more stable environment.

I went back in December of 2005 and it was just devastating. There were more vacant lots than houses in my old neighborhood. I stood on the vacant lot where the house I grew up in used to be. I could see houses 5 blocks away because the neighborhood was mostly empty space.

Everywhere I went it was desolate. There used to be all kinds of stores and shops on 7 mile, and now there are just boarded up, graffitied buildings.

My sister opened a small business downtown and within a 6 month period her car radio was stolen, windows broken and wallet stolen from her car, she was robbed at gunpoint and carjacked with my niece who was a year old at the time. The Livonia police recovered the car, but not once did the Detroit Police follow up or attempt to arrest anyone for any of this. I told her she needs to move to Chicago. You can't live in a city where you experience more crime in 6 months than I have in the 13 years since I left.

Detroit Blog is a site that covers all of this, especially the architectural treasures of Detroit that have been lost to neglect. I enjoy reading it and highly recommend spending an afternoon going through the archives. It's really painful for me, but there is no other site as thorough.

After growing up in Detroit, living in other cities was a culture shock. Growing up poor makes one accustomed to certain things that someone better off would find intolerable or unacceptable. Similarly, growing up a in a city with such a poverty of spirit obscured how many horrible things I'd just gotten used to when I lived there (like the hot, unreliable, filthy city buses). When I first encountered, in Houston, well maintained, clean, air conditioned city buses that ran on something approximating a schedule, I was floored. It just never occurred to me that city services could be anything other than minimal. It was like going from sleeping 3 or 4 to a bed every night to having my own room.

Detroit is a broken city due to poor management by incompetent elected officials and a populace that seems determined to elect a mayor to spite the rest of the state instead of one that will govern effectively. That is not to say that there were not some deliberate efforts to hurt the city economically by its suburbs and Mr. Engler, but a lot of blame can be placed at the feet of a string of useless mayors (including the current one).

Sorry for the rambling, but it's a very emotional issue for me. Leaving Detroit was like leaving an abusive home and thinking about the city ties me up in knots.
posted by eisbaer at 10:04 AM on March 21, 2007 [22 favorites]

So sounds to me like you need to get a Mayor who will crack down on the city hard and clean it up, and who isn't afraid of political ramifications for tough decisions.
posted by dios at 12:20 PM on March 21

Authoritarianism! YeeeHaw!

Get dem jackboots on, me boy-os. Kick in some doors and kick up some prosperity, that's what I say. Beat up some 'hoods and Big Business will start flinging money at you. Get rid of da bums and the respectable people will all come rushing back in droves.

Detroit, Detroit,
It's a wonderful town
The jobs are gone
And the prices are down
Detroit, Detroit
It's a helluva town!
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 10:05 AM on March 21, 2007

Hey Eisbaear, I too went to Cass Tech (and before that Golightly). What years were you there? There's so much about Detroit that is so hard to explain to people who haven't lived there - and is so much worse than anything I've seen in Washington and Chicago where I've lived since there. Going home is like visiting a different planet.
posted by fancypants at 10:07 AM on March 21, 2007

What a sad and frustrating situation. I have never been to Detroit, but the detroitblog post instantly reminded of when I used to live in Poughkeepsie, NY. I recognize the neighborhoods decaying into woods and fields. They seem beautiful and picturesque, especially this time of year when everything is green and flowering. But "the dope dealers, the hookers, and the walking dead ambling past empty fields" make it an unsettling or dangerous place to be.

What appears to be a little oasis in an urban environment is actually a scary wasteland where almost anything can occur. In the case of my neighborhood, it was a serial killer living up the block and keeping bodies in his attic.
posted by annaramma at 10:09 AM on March 21, 2007

It looks like a great opportunity for someone in the next few years. Someone is going to get rich off this, even if the jobless continue to flee for now. Seeing the prairie take over the roads looks great to me in theory, but not if people go break new land to build on. Interesting. Thanks.
posted by Listener at 10:12 AM on March 21, 2007

So New Orleans can't get rebuilt, and Detroit is falling into disrepair. St. Louis, are you still out there?
posted by Pastabagel at 10:13 AM on March 21, 2007

The phrase "Will The Last Person To Leave Detroit Please Turn Out The Lights?" has been around a long time. It was on bumper stickers on cars back when I was a kid. I was in one of them.

In the late 1970s Detroit was still a boomtown, and had been resting in its laurels from as far back as the early 1900s when Henry Ford put them on the map. There was a Henry Ford museum and Greenich Village which tried to capture those heady days and magically keep them frozen in time forever. It was idyllic and conservatively pretentious. I loved Detroit when I was a kid.

Then foreign auto manufacturers began giving Ford and Chevy a run for their money. My dad had a great job and potential for a burgeoning career with a major steel manufacturer in the area, but then the bottom blew out and after having lived there many years, we turned south. That bumper sticker was very popular, for those who could still afford to buy one in a Stuckey's on the way to Toledo Ohio; Michigan's drainpipe to the rest of the country.

Michael Moore's documentary "Roger and Me" is as much a time capsule of that time as it is an opinionated treatise against big business. Watching his first major work is particularly daunting for me, because it cuts me to the quick. I never had to skin a rabbit, but I knew people who did.

Frankly, I'm surprised Detroit isn't a ghost town by now. Or maybe it is, and has been for a very long time, and those still there don't realize how haunted they really are.
posted by ZachsMind at 10:15 AM on March 21, 2007 [3 favorites]

I was class of '94, but I left after junior year when I got a scholarship to a boarding school. So it was Fall 90 - Spring 93.

And you're right about it being hard to explain. I tell people that I wish something cataclysmic had happened because that's at least something I could come to terms with. Instead I have to reconcile how a city with over a million people can die of neglect.
posted by eisbaer at 10:16 AM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Maybe Detroit could pioneer the concept of winding up a city. There's no rule that says cities have to live forever, is there? They could sell off all civic buildings and give relocation grants to those who can't afford to get out themselves. And if they have no money left to bulldoze the site back into fields, they could put a fence round it and open the world's first Abandoned City Theme Park. Like Chernobyl, but without the frozen radiation and Russian heavies guarding the ticket office!
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 10:20 AM on March 21, 2007 [4 favorites]

I grew up in DC during the bad years of the crack era, and visited Detroit and environs (and drove around downtown and the various ring road areas) last year.

DC was bad... really bad. Detroit looks like Dresden after WWII. It's unbelievable to me to see 30-story buildings boarded up, and the grand Michigan Central train station in tatters. It's hard to believe that stately edifices like these buildings can just be... abandoned. Scary stuff.
posted by fet at 10:21 AM on March 21, 2007

I had no idea it was this bad, and I'm fascinated. I live in an area of California where every tiny piece of land is worth $500K and every bungalow around $1 million. Beautiful old neighborhoods full of well-built craftsman architecture worth basically nothing? How strange.
posted by letitrain at 10:22 AM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

To those who are mocking the "cleaning up the town" thing... I guess you missed the transformation of NYC from crime-ridden, trashed out shell of its former greatness into a good town again, in less than a span of 10-15 years. If it worked in NYC, it can work in Detroit. And it doesn't mean lynching the poor people or whatever kind of hyperbolic nonsense you want to throw out there. The problems aren't going to solve themselves on their own.
posted by dios at 10:27 AM on March 21, 2007 [4 favorites]

I've been to Detroit once, when my band was on tour. It's the only time in my life (and I've lived for 5+ years within blocks of Downtown Milwaukee) where I could tell with absolute certainty that a person standing on the street was a prostitute.
posted by drezdn at 10:32 AM on March 21, 2007

My folks live in Detroit, grew up in Oakland County though. They bought a cheapo bungelow a few years ago.

I find that they, and my Oakland County relatives, could care less about the real problems of the city. They also can't believe that I wouldn't want to drive an SUV, much less an American made car.

Are they all living in la-la land about the state of the economy or is it just my perception?
posted by k8t at 10:34 AM on March 21, 2007

For you Urban Exploration types..

Forgotten Michigan.

It's sad because some of the buildings are really nice. The stonework on some of them is gorgeous.
An acquaintance of mine is a firefighter/paramedic for the Detroit FD and had some great stories about the Highland Park area. I might actually go visit one day.
posted by drstein at 10:37 AM on March 21, 2007 [2 favorites]

I've been to Detroit once, when my band was on tour. It's the only time in my life (and I've lived in many neighborhoods featuring crack whores) that I've been offered a blowjob to drive someone a half mile.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 10:37 AM on March 21, 2007

My dad grew up in Detroit, and he moved my Mom and me out of there back in 1966. He continued to work out of Detroit, and of course we'd go there for various reasons over the years. There are things that are hard to explain to those who've never been there - the rows of burned out buildings for example. It's amazing to find now that I live in California, the number of people who've never heard of "Devil's Night." I remember saying when I first got here: "You know, the night they set all the abandoned houses on fire!"

My dad once took me to the house he grew up in. The roof was caving in, and there were still people living in it. It was incredibly sad.

During the 80's there was a semi-official rule that you could blow stoplights in certain sections of the city, for risk of car-jacking. I truly can't believe that they haven't turned the lights out yet. Someone pull the plug, please!
posted by The Light Fantastic at 10:37 AM on March 21, 2007

PS, my Oakland County relatives and parents also can't believe that the cheapest house in my city is $800,000 and that we pay $2k/month for rent.
posted by k8t at 10:37 AM on March 21, 2007

K8T - the foreign made car thing is a tough one. People aren't in la-la-land about the economy, but they look around and they see that their dad and their uncles and their grandparents their friend's relatives all worked for the auto industry, and it makes it hard to buy a foreign car. I ended up buying a Ford Focus (which is actually a great little car) last year because I couldn't bring myself to buy a foreign car.
posted by fancypants at 10:38 AM on March 21, 2007

dios, nyc always had jobs. Even when things were bad it was still the economic heart of America.

I'd love to see Rudy G tackle detroit. It would be like watching Phil Jackson try to win a championship coaching the Atlanta Hawks.
posted by srboisvert at 10:39 AM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

But we had the Super Bowl last year!

That was supposed to fix everything!

.... sigh.
posted by kbanas at 10:40 AM on March 21, 2007

NYC had some big advantages, though, dios, most notably the fact that it was not completely beholden to one large moribund industry. Detroit doesn't seem to have anything positive going for it right now. It's not a financial center, nor a tourist destination, nor a port, nor even a good place for kids from Jersey to get drugs. So, yes, a law-and-order mayor is just what the doctor ordered, but there also must be a huge investment in bringing businesses (ie, jobs) into the city.
posted by Mister_A at 10:40 AM on March 21, 2007

If it worked in NYC, it can work in Detroit.

It would be nice if it could, but there's a huge difference. Even during the dark ages of NY, there was still a vibrant business community. Detroit just doesn't have that.

To revive Detroit, it would probably take a concerted effort on the part of the city, state, and federal government. Including active efforts from each of the three to convince businesses to relocate to Detroit. Without jobs, people will continue to move away.

In the past, part of the reason for the success of Detroit was its proximity to water, allowing easy access to both rail and water transport. It's just not as essential as it once was, as shipping has changed dramatically.

The other thing that could save it, would be some sort of fluke. Some unforeseen industry that Detroit is especially adapted for (say San Francisco and the web circa the late 90s) or an active desire to move away from the suburbs model back towards the cities (though Detroit lacks the jobs to really pull this off).

And as for Rudy G., to claim that he was alone in restoring NYC isn't very accurate. During the NYC regrowth, there was active investment from the Feds (ie. Clinton) into policing and business redevelopment. There were also some smart new policing strategies which Rudy G. claims credit for, but didn't come up with, and may have actually hindered.
posted by drezdn at 10:41 AM on March 21, 2007 [2 favorites]

Sounds to me like what they need is a take-no-shit mayor like Rudy G. to come in there and clean the town up.

An alternative would be to forcibly place the entire metro area under one unified government. The resulting government gets more tax base to draw from, well-off suburbs can't pretend they aren't part of a larger community, and the population of the larger community gets a say in how the inner city runs itself.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:41 AM on March 21, 2007 [3 favorites]

Ahh, srboisvert beat me to it. Well met sir!
posted by Mister_A at 10:42 AM on March 21, 2007

Half makes me wonder if Detroit shouldn't lower the drinking age to 18 and legalize soft drugs, to turn itself into sort of a vice party town that Las Vegas once was? It would bring in quick cash that the city apparently needs.
posted by geoff. at 10:43 AM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

For another city past its prime, look to Buffalo, which used to be huge due to its prime shipping location.

It's interesting to me how cities developed based so much around shipping. For example, Chicago got so big because the cheapest way to ship things would be to send it by water as far as possible (ie. the end of Lake Michigan) and then send it by rail the rest of the way (or backwards if you're shipping livestock or agriculture).
posted by drezdn at 10:44 AM on March 21, 2007

I used to live in Poughkeepsie, NY.

*waves*

In the case of my neighborhood, it was a serial killer living up the block and keeping bodies in his attic.

annaramma's referring to Kendall Francois, whose profile was considered atypical even by serial killer standards.

Since then, a number of places have flourished in Poughkeepsie, but real estate rate remains overinflated, due to the changing climate of the area. Many (current) dwellers of the area have relocated from NYC, Albany or Connecticut, often for economic reasons and competitive schooling, who then commute back to their old spots. Into this setting, a number of drug-related homicides have increased, along with an influx of residents who prefer not to know the area, making the prospect of further flareups a possibility.
posted by Smart Dalek at 10:45 AM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

That's the real problem here. Largely because of racial tensions, there's a complete lack of awareness of Detroit as a metro-area. It's virtually impossible to get anything done regionally without squabbling that inevitably has its roots in Detroit's resentment of white abandonment of the city and the suburban why-don't-you-just-pull-yourself-up attitude. Communities continue to quarrel with one another while the whole region is slipping away - there's a reason Detroit is the largest metro area without any sort of transit system that exceeds bus service, which is actually a pretty good case study of how regional problems are caused by disagreements between cities. The region has two bus systems: DDOT serves the city of Detroit, and SMART serves the suburbs. Certainly they could save money and provide better service through a regional transit authority, which was attempted a few years ago but vetoed by former Gov. Engler, then killed by the courts. Recently, some suburban communities have opted out of the SMART system (most notably Livonia).
posted by ofthestrait at 10:45 AM on March 21, 2007

It would probably also help a lot to put in place single-payer national health care, which would take a huge cost burden off of the car industry and help the old companies be vastly more competitive.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:45 AM on March 21, 2007

A great future awaits if you can just holdout until 2027. (nsfw)
posted by and hosted from Uranus at 10:45 AM on March 21, 2007

"In the case of my neighborhood, it was a serial killer living up the block and keeping bodies in his attic."

Oh, we had one of those in downtown Sacramento too, except she was burying them in her yard. And nobody noticed.

This story is pretty sad. The airport at DTW is beautiful. Michigan is beautiful too. I've enjoyed my trips there. but I haven't been into downtown Detroit.. yet.
posted by drstein at 10:46 AM on March 21, 2007

^^ I was just talking about this with a friend at work...
posted by Mister_A at 10:47 AM on March 21, 2007

Single-payer healthcare and the Big 3 I mean...
posted by Mister_A at 10:48 AM on March 21, 2007

For another city past its prime, look to Buffalo, which used to be huge due to its prime shipping location.

Similar thing there too. You want to see Buffalo change, abolish Amherst and Cheektowaga and the Tonawandas and Lackawanna and so on and shift them all forcibly into the same governmental bed with Buffalo.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:50 AM on March 21, 2007

I agree with the point about needing the business support and financial infrastructure to revive the town. And I think ROU's point would help too. I didn't mean to suggest that it only took a law-and-order mayor. I was merely suggesting one thing it needed. I don't think you will attract the businesses or the people until the city is cleaned up. I don't know if the businesses or the people come first (chicken/egg), but I do know you won't have one without the other. And you will have neither with a rundown crime-ridden city.

Again, I'm no expert on Detroit and don't presume to be. This is purely an outsiders perspective. If I'm a business owner looking to move to a new city, I'm probably not going to go to the run down criminal one. If Detroit was cleaned up and offering me similar incentives as another city, then its back on my list. So there are lots of things that need to happen; I was just proposing one that might be a major one.
posted by dios at 10:50 AM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Single-payer healthcare and the Big 3 I mean...

I think we're rapidly approaching a point where big business (including and especially the car companies) decides it would be cheaper to support a government run single payer system, and soon it will be big business and unions lobbying for government healthcare while the insurance industry and medical industry lobby against it.
posted by drezdn at 10:51 AM on March 21, 2007

It seems like, and I'm clearly not an economist, this is what happens when you have an industrial monocrop system.

The city was entirely dependant on one industry. When that industry (inevitably) gave up on Detroit, everything collapsed.

It's a tragedy.
posted by serazin at 10:53 AM on March 21, 2007

Speaking as someone born in Detroit and still living in the area (Ann Arbor), I can confirm that most folks I know are now in one of two camps: either actively and openly planning to leave, or stubbornly refusing to and angry at the former group for being quitters. I've even seen the split in-family, with my father bailing for Jacksonville and my brother staying here -- after working together in Detroit for a decade.

Most of the latter group, of which I'm one, can come up with little better to say than "well, at least when it comes back it should come back big and I won't miss it." The truth is really just that we love Michigan -- not the government or the cities or the economy, but just the physical state. The water, and the trees, the tough "real people" vibe and mindset, and even the crazy weather. Us holdouts, we don't even get why everyone seems to be moving to the places you are. We can't imagine living in places that warm, waterless, crowded... and, to us, boring. I've turned down multiple offers to move to the coasts -- where I'd have to make twice the money to afford a decent apartment, when I own a house here.

When folks do leave, it's often not to where you'd expect. The Detroit area regularly gets worker recruitment campaigns from harsher weather places like Wyoming, where they are jobs -- because Michiganders will actually tolerate living there.

"Detroit" proper is moving further and further out in a virtual blast wave of suburb building, but we're rapidly running out of "out" to move to as the flight of people begins brushing against the decay radius of other dying cities like Flint, Jackson, Lansing and Saginaw. When the room runs out, that's when things here will get their worst.

But as many of us are fond of joking, there's nothing wrong with Detroit that burning it down and starting over wouldn't solve.
posted by Pufferish at 10:53 AM on March 21, 2007

Sounds to me like what they need is a take-no-shit mayor like Rudy G. to come in there and clean the town up.

Dios, while I'm glad that the crime rate in New York has dropped (I won't romanticize the sleazoid 70's the way some might) there's been some serious blowback to a lot of his policies. the overeagerness of some of our police force has exacerbated racial tensions* and he seemed indifferent to the gentrification that's driven housing prices into the stratosphere, thus driving the working and middle class further and further out and destroying older neighborhoods. Plus, while I don't want Times Square to become Scumbucket Disneyland again, I'm not too fond of the giant mall it's become.

*and if the news is any indication the crime rate seems to be rising. Just the other night some psycho shot two unarmed auxilliary cops and an unarmed bartender. I kind of wonder if that crime drop wasn't just a natural cycle or something.
posted by jonmc at 10:57 AM on March 21, 2007 [2 favorites]

ofthestrait :
Awesome name!

For the unaware, Detroit, translated from French, means "of the strait."

I'm also now kicking myself for not making my name "piglady."
posted by eisbaer at 10:57 AM on March 21, 2007

A good lifelong friend of mine, who had spent her whole life up to college graduation in the Baltimore/DC corridor, who then did grad school in Flagstaff, AZ (skiing!) and internships in South Florida (beaches!), did what any normal person would do when she found out that her new husband's four year medical residency was to be in Detroit:

She cried for a week.
posted by contessa at 10:57 AM on March 21, 2007

The crime rate is rising nation-wide, and seems to be symptomatic of a dearth of financial opportunity and the ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots.

Nevertheless, I do agree with dios that a law-and-order mayor can do a lot for a place like Detroit, if better safety and law enforcement can be deployed as part of a comprehensive bail-out.
posted by Mister_A at 11:05 AM on March 21, 2007

Kwame Kilpatrick, son of Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, Mayor of Detroit:

"The central focus of the career center is a coaching model. We’ll be assessing individuals. We’ll be giving them occupational testing and guiding them through a process that will put them on a path to a real career...

The only thing this process requires of each participant is a personal commitment to be ready to learn and to prepare themselves to work. That means going to class. That means developing the skills that will make you employable. That means developing good work habits. And, yes, it means being able to pass a drug test. "

That last line received the most applause of the night.

In regards to law-and-order: Kwame also announced plans to hire 200 new police officers. Certainly not enough, but, a good start.

@eisbaer: thanks. but, piglady? i don't get it.
posted by ofthestrait at 11:05 AM on March 21, 2007

What do you do with the abandoned houses in your neighborhood? Tyree Guyton turns them into art. His mother's old house. The Heidelberg Project website. Then the police bulldoze, etc. etc. and he keeps at it.
posted by bobobox at 11:09 AM on March 21, 2007

I've been furiously googling, but there doesn't seem to be much about the Belle Isle Piglady around. It was a local urban legend the kids in my neighborhood used to scare each other with. The details are foggy, but she looks like a pig, may or may not be a witch, and devours kids. If you go off in the woods on Belle Isle she may get you!

Pretty standard boogeyman fare. I hadn't thought about it in years. The pig aspect makes it uniquely Detroit:

Belle Isle was known to the Indians as Wah-nah-be-zee (White Swan) and was later renamed Isle St. Claire by the French. It was also called Ile de Cochons (Island of the Hogs) because wild pigs had been placed on the island by the first settlers.

The name "Ile de Cochons" rules your face.
posted by eisbaer at 11:13 AM on March 21, 2007

Let's blame the auto unions

Um, that's pretty much exactly right.
posted by tadellin at 11:15 AM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

It's interesting and depressing to look at the area described in the original post's detroitblog link on Google Maps satellite view. Wow.
posted by Kat Allison at 11:16 AM on March 21, 2007

Huh. I never heard of the Belle Isle Piglady... I always heard about the Nain Rouge.

I also found this interesting site, which mentions a Belle Isle Snake Goddess? wtf?
posted by ofthestrait at 11:18 AM on March 21, 2007

To those who are mocking the "cleaning up the town" thing... I guess you missed the transformation of NYC from crime-ridden, trashed out shell of its former greatness into a good town again, in less than a span of 10-15 years.

NYC never came close to Detroit. A few neighborhoods did, but Manhatten and all that money was always right over the river, all part of the same city. Intelligent (not so much tough, but cracking down on quality of life crimes) certainly helped, but then so did economic revival of the 80's and '90's.
posted by caddis at 11:23 AM on March 21, 2007

A city has to have a reason to exist; now that manufacturing has dried up, what reason is there for Detroit *not* to shut down?

A strong mayor is no good if there's nothing to govern, and Detroit seems headed towards nothing fast. Is hoverboard's idea of closing it down, selling the remaining assets to help citizens relocate, and tearing down the remaining structures so bold an idea? Is it better just to let the place rot?

The biggest issue I could see is what do you do with the land if the city buildings were gone...is there still a small town? Does it become a park? Do you sell it off to developers to build McMansions? Does it become a Superfund cleanup site, if it has lots of heavy metals in the soil?

The biggest problem may simply be there is no political will to take on these big issues in Michigan (I leave that question to Michiganers), and so the city will just keep rotting.
posted by emjaybee at 11:25 AM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Kat Allison,

That inspired me to look at my old neighborhood. The houses are supposed to be pressed together like sardines. I recall that an adult could stand between two houses and almost touch both of them with his or her arms spread. Look at Northfield. Almost a whole block is just...gone. Same with Vancourt.
posted by eisbaer at 11:26 AM on March 21, 2007

That shot of the State Fair neighborhood from the air is incredible. For a slightly less depressing view of the city, here is the neighborhood I grew up in. All of the flat roofs are relatively new condos and town houses.
posted by fancypants at 11:26 AM on March 21, 2007

For another city past its prime, look to Buffalo, which used to be huge due to its prime shipping location.

You could just as easily put "Baltimore" in that sentence. It took me a while to understand the provincialism I grew up with: people honestly seemed to think B-more was a major American city.

Finally I understood that it had been at one point, but probably not since the 1800s.
posted by drjimmy11 at 11:36 AM on March 21, 2007

"they need is a take-no-shit mayor like Rudy G. to come in there and clean the town up"
The Big Apple just needed polishing.
Detroit is a rotting lemon.
posted by 2sheets at 11:38 AM on March 21, 2007

Dr. Jimmy -

I think that's part of why I love The Wire so much. It could so easily be set in Detroit. Especially Season Two.
posted by fancypants at 11:40 AM on March 21, 2007

The more I read through it, the more impressed I am with detroitblog. The entry on the derelict old Hotel Fort Wayne is fantastic. Thanks so much for the link to this site, fancypants!
posted by Kat Allison at 11:46 AM on March 21, 2007

Here are the reasons Detroit is far, far from dead:

(1) It's still the center of the region, all roads run through it, at some point a corporation looking for a region with affordable housing and decent infrastructure will relocate here. Boeing left Seattle for Chicago, no reason some smart company couldn't move here.

(2) It's the seventh borough, just after Philly, before Baltimore, ahead of D.C. All the art kids who are being pushed out of pricey Williamsburg might want to consider it.

(3) There's a great bar downtown (Cliff Belles) there's a good restaurant (Atlas) and there's a good movie theater (D.I.A.)

(4) If you sit in front of the Diego Rivera mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts you will have your mind blown. Seriously, it's better than drugs.

(5) In Lafayette Park you can buy a Mies Van Der Rohe townhouse for just over $100,000.00. And it's in beautiful shape.

(6) One of these days someone is going to stick a high speed commuter train connecting Ann Arbor and Chicago and the downtown rail station (which they'll have renovated like Jackie O renovated Grand Central), making the entire region come to life.

(7) Detroit is hundreds of feet above sea level. And since we can't seem to get our act together on climate change, the coastal cities are screwed.

(8) And most importantly, Lupitas in Mexican Village has the best tacos east of the Mississippi.
posted by tobybarlowny at 11:50 AM on March 21, 2007 [4 favorites]

Hey Pufferfish - thanks for mentioning Jackson! Although I didn't end up growing up in Detroit, I did grow up in Jackson, one of the little cities decimated by the death of the auto industry. I give you a big "atta-puff" for staying in Michigan - I couldn't even hack Ann Arbor with it's "highest rate of phd's flipping burgers" economy.

I laughed my butt off when I moved to Berkeley, CA. 5 pages of want ads (in '92)! I miss Michigan, I always will - but a person has got to eat!
posted by The Light Fantastic at 11:50 AM on March 21, 2007

What Detroit Can Learn from Bangalore

Also, nice job blaming white people for the state of affairs in Detroit. When the likes of Coleman Young and Kwame Kilpatrick are vilifying white residents at every turn, it's not surprising that they flee. They probably don't want to pay for the mayor's massages, or his wife's Navigator. Or maybe they don't like their elected leader to liken them to Klansmen.
posted by Kwantsar at 11:51 AM on March 21, 2007

Wow. What's particularly nuts about the "lynching" ad (kwantsar's last link) is that Freman Hendrix, Kilpatrick's opponent, is black.
posted by Mister_A at 11:57 AM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

A lot of you are mentioning how the decline of the auto industry is the cause of the decline, and I suppose you're right, but looking at Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, I'm not so sure. Each of those cities was based on many industries, all of which have completely disappeared. Railroads, mining, steel, gone gone gone. People forget that before the oil boom in texas, the petroleum capital of the US was PA. A great many of the huge locomotives that we sold in the US were built in PA, and the coal that drove them was mined from there. When the coal industry disintegrated, the railroads collapsed, and then Japan destroyed the American steel industry, those cities were hit decade after decade. And yet they survived and renewed themselves. They aren't the industrial centers of the country the way they once were, but they have survived and have the ability to attract people to live there.

The auto industry is not completely dead, and won't be for the foreseeable future. The problem I think is that Detroit isn't doing what these cities did to reinvigorate themselves. In particular, the dot com boom was an opportunity missed that philly and pittsburgh made an effort to develop. All that dot com money is still in those places, and PA is host to a great many direct tech and non-tech companies that rely heavily on technology.

If anyone knows the philly area, it seems to me that a microcosm of detroit would be Norristown, PA.
posted by Pastabagel at 11:58 AM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Detroit is on "maps.live.com" in 3-D. Kat Allison's link on that site.
posted by maxwelton at 12:01 PM on March 21, 2007

A lot of Hendrix supporters were white suburbanites.
posted by ofthestrait at 12:05 PM on March 21, 2007

Detroit is actually a beautiful city that's lost it's shine.

I had been there only once when I was 18. I drove through on my way into Canada. It was a hole then. Recently, I've had the opportunity to discover Detroit more intimately. I'm there a couple times a month. There is effort to revitalize.

But all of the above is correct w/r/t jobs. Detroit needs to do the following:

1. Lure "thought work" companies with the promise of tax incentives, low cost office space, etc.

2. Lure "thought works" with the low cost of living & urban affordability.

3. Keep things safe for both of the above.

4. Profit!!!

Seriously though, I like Detroit quite a bit and I'm hopeful that things bottom out soon and start to rebound. It'd be a shame to lose all that history.
posted by FlamingBore at 12:05 PM on March 21, 2007

Will The Last Person To Leave Detroit Please Turn Shoot Out The Lights?

FTFY.
posted by jet_silver at 12:07 PM on March 21, 2007

Ironically, the biggest tool of suburban sprawl was the automobile, so in a way, Detroit indirectly created one of the mechanisms of its demise.
posted by drezdn at 12:08 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Did anyone link to Forgotten Detroit yet? Lots of pics here.

A band I used to be in recorded a record in downtown Detroit (Ghetto Recording, next to The Fox) in the early 90s and being there for an extended period fairly blew my mind. I don't think I will ever be able to completely forget staring at (what I imagine was) the Michigan Central Depot, looming like some dead ruin on the horizon, extremely eerie in some way I can't really explain.

The people we stayed with lived in large, old houses which most of them were actually paying for (as opposed to renting) - and these were people who'd definitely be renting in any other large city. They seemed to have a strange attitude overall about Detroit, simultaneously proud (esp. of their musical heritage), angry, righteous, bemused. I remember at one guy's place there was a local coffeetable book out featuring nothing but pictures of burn-out cars.

Driving down streets you'd see a lovely turn-of-the-century home, followed by a smoking ruin, followed by a vacant lot, followed by another lovely old home - it's completely surreal. I remember at the time there was a lot of talk about how Detroit was on its way up again, but sadly that doesn't seem to have quite come to pass.
posted by stinkycheese at 12:10 PM on March 21, 2007

So, fascinated by all of the linked material and comments, I scooted over to the Wikipedia entry on Detroit. It's (compared to the info here) shockingly upbeat. Boosterish Wiki editing, or is this thread exaggerated?
posted by COBRA! at 12:10 PM on March 21, 2007

Here's a random spot in Detroit on zillow.com. Could someone more familiar with the city post a better link so we can see the scope of the housing mess for ourselves?
posted by Pastabagel at 12:10 PM on March 21, 2007

FlamingBore, not many sane businesses will move to Michigan.
posted by Kwantsar at 12:13 PM on March 21, 2007

Urban prairie.
posted by ofthestrait at 12:14 PM on March 21, 2007

The problem is, aside from furniture commercials, we haven't seen much of this guy lately. (youtube)
posted by evilcolonel at 12:14 PM on March 21, 2007

Here's the Zillow data for the neighborhood I grew up in. The only thing in my old zip code is a 3 bedroom townhouse going for $391,000. I'd say that's pretty high for the neighborhood, but not totally out of line. Generally considered one of the most thriving in the city. Downtown and Lafayette Park are the source of a lot of the civic boosterism you see about Detroit these days and a lot of that is deserved. People were genuinely impressed when they came to town for the Super Bowl and baseball All Star Game. HOWEVER, once you get out of downtown, then no this thread is not exaggerated. At all.

And more than that, even when you live downtown there are serious city services and amenities that are just missing. Like shopping. There's literally nowhere to shop in the city of Detroit. To buy a pair of socks or a CD or anything but groceries, you must drive to the suburbs. This may be changing a bit with the redevelopment of Campus Martius downtown, but last time I was home it was still very much the case.

Since leaving Detroit, I've lived in Washington and Chicago, and I've never seen anything that compares to the detestation of Detroit. But at the same time, there's a sort of savage pride and kind of insane boosterism among people who live there. It's weird.
posted by fancypants at 12:22 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

COBRA! - I think the true state of the city lies somewhere between wikipedia and this thread - certainly some neighborhoods of the city are doing well (or, at least, not falling apart) and other neighborhoods are just like this thread describes.

Certainly sentences like this are disingenous: "The city's streamlined government has a balanced budget and is seeing new growth in business and tourism."

Umm... there's no way this can be. The citation is a speech from Kwame. Detroit is a few years away from defaulting and possibly facing financial takeover from the state of Michigan.

"Office construction surrounding the revitalized Campus Martius Park included the 2004 opening of Compuware World Headquarters and the 2006 opening of Ernst & Young's new offices at One Kennedy Square."

What they don't tell you is that the bottom 8 floors are unoccupied.
posted by ofthestrait at 12:27 PM on March 21, 2007

Pastabagel - that isn't far off. Zoom in some on the different areas. In particular, I can tell you, Harper Woods is pretty spot on. Homes are sitting on the market for a long time. They are often sold for less than what people bought them for. And this is a decent area next door to the Grosse Pointes - arguably the nicest burbs in the Detroit Metro area.

Kwanstar - I know. What I'm saying is that they need to find a way to change that.
posted by FlamingBore at 12:29 PM on March 21, 2007

"Let's blame the auto unions"

"Um, that's pretty much exactly right."

Or, you know, you could like, blame the big three for putting out poorly thought out, poorly built, gas guzzling crap that no one wants to buy, while sticking their thumbs in their ears and chanting "la la la la la, I can't heeeeaaaaar yooooouuu...." for the last twenty years or so...
posted by stenseng at 12:33 PM on March 21, 2007

Ironically, the biggest tool of suburban sprawl was the automobile, so in a way, Detroit indirectly created one of the mechanisms of its demise.
posted by drezdn at 12:08 PM on March 21

Is that too sad to be funny or too funny to be sad?
posted by hexxed at 12:36 PM on March 21, 2007

It's virtually impossible to get anything done regionally without squabbling that inevitably has its roots in Detroit's resentment of white abandonment of the city and the suburban why-don't-you-just-pull-yourself-up attitude.

This is a pretty good summation of a very complex problem. I would only add that the "resentment" manifests itself in outright hostility and punitive policy decisions (see the current water rate fiasco), and some suburbanites seize on the hostility as a reason not to care or support the city. In both cases, it's very much a cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face scenario. But it ain't changing anytime soon.

Wow. What's particularly nuts about the "lynching" ad (kwantsar's last link) is that Freman Hendrix, Kilpatrick's opponent, is black.

Well, in Detroit, there's "black" and then there's Black. The phrase "not black enough" is a common one around these parts.
posted by pardonyou? at 12:36 PM on March 21, 2007

"So New Orleans can't get rebuilt, and Detroit is falling into disrepair. St. Louis, are you still out there?"

Indeed. Two major US cities that look like they may never recover. How many others are on the way?

Anyone think this is an isolated phenomenon, only occurring city by city? Hm? (Hint: it's not.)

New Orleans will survive to some point because it's an important river- and seaport. Detroit isn't anymore, although if the railroad system can get revived that might help it a lot. St. Lawrence seaway shipping coupled with railroads could give a lot back to Detroit. And surely, some other kind of manufacturing would be nice, but that's all been sent to other countries. No city can survive only on "service" industries; something of value has to be produced or transported for a city to function properly.

As long as the population is falling precipitously, the only thing a city can do is fail.

The failure of two large and important US cities is really quite a bad sign.
posted by zoogleplex at 12:36 PM on March 21, 2007 [2 favorites]

(3) There's a great bar downtown (Cliff Belles) there's a good restaurant (Atlas) and there's a good movie theater (D.I.A.)

Seriously? That's a justification for Detroit being far from dead? The town of 7000 that I grew up in had that. We are talking about a major US city right?
posted by chundo at 12:38 PM on March 21, 2007

Interesting and sad post. Here's another discussion on decaying Detroit on Metafilter.

Abandoned Detroit set on Flickr
posted by Otis at 12:54 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

I love to point towards the great Rust Belt cities of the Midwest when people here in NYC bitch so endlessly about gentrification and "why they hate Williamsburg so much."

Hey hipster, guess what? There are thousands of square feet of loftspace in St. Louis and Detroit just waiting with your name on it. C'mon, have at it! What are you waiting for?
posted by Afroblanco at 1:01 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

First: great post. There's some excellent reporting on those blogs.

Second: Kwantsar's first link? This thing?

What Detroit Can Learn from Bangalore

That's one of the most extraordinary things I've ever read. It's just . . . awesome. For a long time, Tom Friedman was the reigning champion of the Least Accurate Thing Ever Written About India competition ("a country with few natural resources and a terrible climate") but this Shikha Dalmia comes in with a hypothesis built on a bit of Randoid nonsense so spectacularly blinkered and ahistorical it saunters off with Tom's crown like a languid cow in Bangalore traffic. To wit:

The factors that made India the world’s economic basket case after it obtained its independence from Britain in 1947 are precisely what have stymied Detroit’s resurgence: excessive bureaucracy, destructive taxes, and bad labor laws.

I await the interpid Dalmia's follow-up report, wherein the ample parallels between spending the first half of the twentieth century as the birthplace of modern industrialism are equated with similar ease to being a colonial cantonment in a pre-industrial fiefdom governed by a strict and enduring theocratic hierarchy.
posted by gompa at 1:05 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

A city has to have a reason to exist; now that manufacturing has dried up, what reason is there for Detroit *not* to shut down?

There's still almost 900K people living there. That's makes it a pretty big city still. My city, Pittsburgh, is a third that size and we're not shutting down. Where do you propose that almost a million Detroit residents move to when the city gets shut down?
posted by octothorpe at 1:08 PM on March 21, 2007

At least in Buffalo, the areas that got hit the hardest by urban decline were mostly those neighborhoods that weren't well-off to begin with; working-class and lower-middle-class sections of the East Side. Middle-income and upper-income areas north of downtown, on the West Side and North Buffalo are still quite healthy, and seeing quite a bit of new investment. Blue-collar neighborhoods in Riverside/Black Rock and South Buffalo are shopworn and have seen better days, but their state is still far better than a typical Detroit neighborhood. (Outside of the City of Hamtramck enclave, are there still even blue-collar, ethnic Irish/Polish/Italian/whatever neighborhoods in Detroit itself?) Buffalo has a LONG way to go before it even approaches the condition that Detroit is in, but much of the East Side is getting there.

The sad thing about Detroit, as a previous poster said, is the sight of poverty in once-wealthy neighborhoods. Detroit has upscale neighborhoods like Indian Village but they're essentially islands; at their fringes there's gorgeous mansions standing next to burned-out husks.
posted by elmwood at 1:10 PM on March 21, 2007

Flamingbore - if that's right, then all the city needs is to tip in the right direction, and all that real estate will get gobbled up.

There are townhomes in the DC suburb of Northern Virginia that go for $1 million now. The notion that that money could buy 20-30 of the $30-$40k homes in the city in insane. You toss around a few hundred million and a single developer could buy an enormous part of the city.

Ten years from now, could Detroit be the world's first corporate owned city?
posted by Pastabagel at 1:13 PM on March 21, 2007

The failure of two large and important US cities is really quite a bad sign.
posted by zoogleplex 25 minutes ago

It is? Why is that? Seems to me that you are ignoring the issue that the decline of certain cities is linked to the growth of other cities. Cities like Phoenix, Charlotte, Louisville, Austin, Las Vegas and DFW are growing. What is inherently problematic about the fact that some cities are growing and others are not? Sure its bad for the failing city, but on the macro level, it doesn't seem like a real problem.

You seem to be trying to suggest or imply that there is a systemic and irreversible cause for your prediction of the failure of American cities. Care to explain what it is instead of just alluding to a cause?
posted by dios at 1:15 PM on March 21, 2007

Setting aside the gloom-and-doom for a minute, there is still much to be said for Detroit. It has pretty strong support of theater, the sports teams draw huge numbers of people downtown. There are nice places to work and stroll (during the day -- the place tends to be a ghost town on weeknights). The casinos do big business. There are many top-flight eating establishments. There are world-class museums.

I could go on. I guess my point is that as a suburbanite, there are numerous good reasons for me to go to Detroit regularly. I go by myself, I go with friends, I take my kids. My brother got married in a beautifully restored inn in the city last year, and my sister is getting married downtown this summer. This thread could give you the idea that it's like Sadr City out there -- it's not. At least not all of it.
posted by pardonyou? at 1:16 PM on March 21, 2007

Pardonyou -

All of that stuff is great, and I love visiting Detroit to see my Tigers or a show too. But what the city really needs is people to LIVE there, not just come downtown and then leave again. The tax base desperately, desperately needs middle class people to come and live and work in the city. I applaud all of the Downtown/Midtown development. It's amazing how different things look even then the last time I lived in town (2000-ish), but I worry that it's being done at the expense of ignoring the neighborhoods and the actual residents of the city.
posted by fancypants at 1:23 PM on March 21, 2007

They seem beautiful and picturesque, especially this time of year when everything is green and flowering. But "the dope dealers, the hookers, and the walking dead ambling past empty fields" make it an unsettling or dangerous place to be.

There you go. When they finally turn The Walking Dead (comic) into a movie, they can tape it in Detroit!

Detroit and Cleveland (where I live) have an awful lot in common. Hipsters -- seriously! Come on down. You could BUY a house for less than a year's rent in NYC, we've got crazy-good cost of living, we just need some people who don't suck.

I say that only half tongue-in-cheek, because a company I used to do work for closed its NYC office and relocated a ton of people here. The NYCers fell in LOVE with the cheap rent, all the stuff to do, etc. What did my fellow Clevelanders do? Freak out because the city took them on a tour that included a suburban "lifestyle center." Native Clevelanders reflexively, automatically diss their hometown. It's just something we do. And it makes no sense at all because Cleveland, Detroit and other rustbelt cities have a ton to offer the rest of you.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 1:24 PM on March 21, 2007

"Pittsburgh is a third that size and we're not shutting down."

It's worth considering that Pittsburgh may have been saved by being smaller; even with the loss of major industries, the city wasn't small enough to collapse under its own weight. Sometimes smaller is better.

"Where do you propose that almost a million Detroit residents move to when the city gets shut down?"

Where are those who flee moving to now? Where did everyone from New Orleans go? They're spreading out all over the place. This is still a big, big country; the rest of it can absorb a million people fairly well.

Most likely the city will reach some equilibrium population level and then flight will stop.
posted by zoogleplex at 1:39 PM on March 21, 2007

My sister opened a small business downtown and within a 6 month period her car radio was stolen, windows broken and wallet stolen from her car, she was robbed at gunpoint and carjacked with my niece who was a year old at the time. The Livonia police recovered the car, but not once did the Detroit Police follow up or attempt to arrest anyone for any of this. I told her she needs to move to Chicago. You can't live in a city where you experience more crime in 6 months than I have in the 13 years since I left.

Dunno if Chicago is the best recommendation, then; I grew up there, and I know people who had more or less the same experience in more or less the same timeframe.

By the way, since I grew up there, my first thought on reading your comment was "WTF leaving her wallet in the car and having a radio?" Heck, I used to have my car broken into (as in damaged trying to "break" in) even with the doors unlocked and windows down. And this was in a tony neighborhood on the north side.
posted by davejay at 1:43 PM on March 21, 2007

If anyone knows the philly area, it seems to me that a microcosm of detroit would be Norristown, PA.

Chester, Pa is a microcosm of Detroit.

And authoritarianism doesn't work in cities like Philly or Detroit because authoritarianism is expensive and these cities have no money.
posted by The Straightener at 1:46 PM on March 21, 2007

"You seem to be trying to suggest or imply that there is a systemic and irreversible cause for your prediction of the failure of American cities. Care to explain what it is instead of just alluding to a cause?"

Systemic, yes, but certainly not irreversible. There's no single cause, it's a compendium of causes centered around the overall American way of life, and around the economy it's built upon. I think it's beyond the scope of this thread to try to wrangle through the thousands of intertwining threads of causality.

However, the growth that you're pointing out in these other cities bears some close investigation. What, specifically, is making these cities grow and others fail? Phoenix and Las Vegas are particularly interesting, since these seem to have grown simply because housing was cheap as dirt and being built at an astounding rate for 10 years and it doesn't rain much in either place - and energy to sustain these cities has been pretty cheap, too, which may or may not last. Both of those areas are water-poor and require an enormous transport of cheap energy to maintain. I think that infrastructurally these places are already in trouble; it's just not visible yet.

I don't know much about the other cities you mention.

In any event, the fact that the country as a whole is allowing major, important cities to fall apart in a highly disorderly fashion (as opposed to a more managed, orderly process), without offering much in the way of assistance or cooperation, seems to me to be a failing of our national heart and soul.

Nobody's pulling for the whole country anymore, it's pretty much everyone for themselves/their in-group. This is unsustainable in the long run.
posted by zoogleplex at 1:52 PM on March 21, 2007

more like Camden
posted by caddis at 1:53 PM on March 21, 2007

posted by zoogleplex the country as a whole is allowing major, important cities to fall apart in a highly disorderly fashion (as opposed to a more managed, orderly process), without offering much in the way of assistance or cooperation, seems to me to be a failing of our national heart and soul.

I think that's more a by-product of the free market than anything else. In the case of Detroit, the American automobile industry is failing because they do not, cannot, or will not accept the fact the overwhelming majority of Americans want cheap, economical cars. They continue to build crappy, overpriced, gas-guzzling cars and then wonder why they're going bankrupt. Good riddance, I say.

posted by zoogleplex Nobody's pulling for the whole country anymore, it's pretty much everyone for themselves/their in-group. This is unsustainable in the long run.

No, I think it's always been that way.
posted by fandango_matt at 2:03 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Systemic, yes, but certainly not irreversible. There's no single cause, it's a compendium of causes centered around the overall American way of life, and around the economy it's built upon. I think it's beyond the scope of this thread to try to wrangle through the thousands of intertwining threads of causality.

Hmm.... are you suggesting it is a problem with capitalism, comrade? If not, I'm not really sure what grand point you are making.

I fail to see the macro-problem with the fact that we have internal immigration. It would seem like just natural and cyclical changes in preferences. Cities that were major cities in 1840 aren't major cities now. Is that problematic? In sum, I fail to see the problem if in a 20 year period the populations of Detroit and Austin/Louisville/Phoenix/wherever switch.
posted by dios at 2:03 PM on March 21, 2007

I've long held that Detroit is America's first post-apocalyptic city.

A lot of this is exagerrated, some of it isn't. Detroit did begin to recover under Clinton (and Archer), but the movie Zebrahead is also remarkably accurate.
And there are a huge amount of sweet things to do in the city, it's just that they're spread all over. Well, and a huge amount of racism and inability to tell where bad neighborhoods are keep the folks from Royal Oak from branching out.

But yeah, I'd love to go and live in Detroit, close enough to take a bus to the Lager House or Majestic. It's just that there aren't any goddamned jobs for what I'm trained to do.
posted by klangklangston at 2:05 PM on March 21, 2007

Still, at least Detroit's got the best sports market in the country. Pistons, Tigers, Red Wings, and an assortment of great college teams.
posted by klangklangston at 2:06 PM on March 21, 2007

I find this all completely baffling. As mentioned upthread, here in California people are paying outrageous sums for postage-stamp-sized properties. The notion that an entire city is going fallow beggars the imagination, especially one with architecture as beautiful as Detroit's. I doubt I'll be able to afford a house here in the Bay Area in this lifetime, so there's a voice at the back of my head screaming "Move to Detroit and buy that downtown loft you've always wanted!" Urban death be damned, it would be mine mine mine!

I would hazard a guess that that is what will eventually happen - the middle-lower class folks living in the big coastal cities will eventually fill the void, desperate for a chunk of the American Dream that we've all been hearing about.
posted by lekvar at 2:07 PM on March 21, 2007

I would hazard a guess that that is what will eventually happen - the middle-lower class folks living in the big coastal cities will eventually fill the void, desperate for a chunk of the American Dream that we've all been hearing about.

Unless if they move their industries with them (maybe it could happen), this probably won't happen en masse, as there aren't a ton of jobs available.

Much of the rust belt (my city included) is still trying to find its way in a post-industrial world. We built the trains, planes and cars that made the modern world, but the modern world has no interest in us.
posted by drezdn at 2:14 PM on March 21, 2007

Crazier things have happened, lekvar.

A few years ago when my boyfriend was on a let's move to Cupertino kick, I told him oh hell no, I am not paying half a million bucks for some generic 1960s Brady-Bunch-looking house. So, damned if you do, damned if you don't...
posted by bitter-girl.com at 2:19 PM on March 21, 2007

Dear Lord--Match Day was just here and delivered the news: three years in Motown. The wife is scared to death; she thinks Detroit is one big ghetto pudding with a casino or two plopped in. I'm not quite as worried, though having lived relatively nearby I know Detroit's been in the shits for a good long while, and unfortunately it's still nose-down. My relief is I'll likely be working so much during my residency it won't bother me.
posted by adoarns at 2:21 PM on March 21, 2007

In Milwaukee there's been an insane amount of rebuilding in and near the downtown, many of it condos, and there are even sections close to downtown where decent houses are available for 60K or less.

The thing is, there aren't enough jobs here to support a huge immigration of anyone looking for a cheaper cost of living.

The cost of living is nice though, I live in a flat with a huge (for the city) backyard that ends at a river, and I could walk to work if I needed to all for $450 a month.
posted by drezdn at 2:21 PM on March 21, 2007

posted by drezdn We built the trains, planes and cars that made the modern world, but the modern world has no interest in us.

The modern world has no use for and therefore no interest in outdated products.
posted by fandango_matt at 2:27 PM on March 21, 2007

Much of the rust belt (my city included) is still trying to find its way in a post-industrial world.

Milwaukee is so bad, at least it isn't......Gary.
posted by MikeMc at 2:30 PM on March 21, 2007

Seems to me that you are ignoring the issue that the decline of certain cities is linked to the growth of other cities. Cities like Phoenix, Charlotte, Louisville, Austin, Las Vegas and DFW are growing. What is inherently problematic about the fact that some cities are growing and others are not?

Because it's not a question of simple loss and gain, it's a question of what's left behind. What's left behind in shrinking tax base cities is poor and black (Detroit, Baltimore, Philly, New Orleans, etc.) and where the gains are is not. You either feel like this is wrong because you think just because a kid is born dark in Detroit their public institutions (schools, hospitals, social service networks) shouldn't be substantially different in quality than those afforded to a white kid in Orange County but they are. That quality differential impacts outcomes. Crime, violence, unrealized human potential, economic and social immobility, on and on and on.

To represent the problem as, "so what, some people packed up and left Detroit for Austin!" displays a lack of perspective, to say the least.
posted by The Straightener at 2:31 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'd love to go and live in Detroit, close enough to take a bus to the Lager House or Majestic.

There's something interesting in there about how there's no hope of, god forbid, walking somewhere. At least it's a bus and not a car.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 2:39 PM on March 21, 2007

OnlyCoolTim - Detroit is ENORMOUS - almost 150 square miles (Manhattan, by comparison is 23 square miles). That's a lot of walking.
posted by fancypants at 2:44 PM on March 21, 2007

Posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 2:39 PM There's something interesting in there about how there's no hope of, god forbid, walking somewhere. At least it's a bus and not a car.

I have never been to a rust belt city that was a walking city. Certain neighborhoods maybe, but usually you have to drive take a cab or a bus to a different location. Maybe that is why the rust belt is loosing out to other cities. No light rail system.
posted by hexxed at 2:45 PM on March 21, 2007

The wife is scared to death; she thinks Detroit is one big ghetto pudding with a casino or two plopped in ... My relief is I'll likely be working so much during my residency it won't bother me.

For what it's worth (and I'll probably get flamed for this), the Detroit area has some awfully nice suburbs. I know a lot of people who -- like you -- were "forced" to move to the Detroit area for work. They all thought they'd put in their time and move out, but most found they liked the communities, they liked their neighbors, they liked the relative value. So, again, don't get too blinded by the portrayals of disaster.

(Will you be at the Detroit Medical Center? If you end up at Detroit Receiving, I think you'll see things most doctors in the U.S. can't begin to imagine).
posted by pardonyou? at 2:46 PM on March 21, 2007

I fail to see the macro-problem with the fact that we have internal immigration. It would seem like just natural and cyclical changes in preferences. Cities that were major cities in 1840 aren't major cities now. Is that problematic?

Yes, Dios, it is a problem.

When people migrate to a different city, it's not like they take their neighborhoods, factories, garbage, and discarded industrial byproducts with them. All of these get left behind to rot, forming a long slug-trail of urban blight.

What happens when water becomes more expensive and LV and Phoenix become uninhabitable? Maybe the people will find a new place to live, but the cities they leave behind will be every bit as ugly as Detroit.

It's very telling that the suburbs of Detroit are becoming far-enough-flung that they're starting to touch on the already-blighted radii of other failed cities.

What happens when there's nowhere else to go?
posted by Afroblanco at 2:46 PM on March 21, 2007

What happens when there's nowhere else to go?
posted by Afroblanco at 2:46 PM on March 21

Robocop.
posted by drezdn at 2:52 PM on March 21, 2007 [1 favorite]