if your entire economy rapidly contracts then you're going to have pockets of decay regardless. Detroit also is a massively sprawling city with 138 sq miles of land vs. SF's 49 square miles of land and oakland's 55 sq miles of land.
Detroit is huge. It's really, really big. It was once a top-10 city in the world and one of the wealthiest. Now it's dirt poor (by American standards) and significantly depopulated, but it's still physically huge. It's like when you cut back a really big tree... it can't help but grow back with little shoots, because if what's left of the plant tries to revitalize the entire empty shell, it'll simply die trying.
It would be a grave error to choke off the shoots of growth in Detroit out of some misguided sense of it somehow not being fair that it's not evenly distributed. This isn't San Francisco in wealth and power that maybe is doing something you don't like, with resources to spare if it just did $WHATEVER. This is, even now, a city on the edge, a city with massive financial problems even with its current financial outlays that you would probably find horribly inadequate, a city with no resources to speak of. Choke off the growth shoots and you won't get a broad-based resurgence, you'll just get nothing.
(First rule of wealth redistribution: Make sure there is wealth to redistribute! The only way the city is going to get resources to spread the revitalization around is if there is somebody being successful, somewhere.)
Chicago and Detroit also look pretty different economically. Detroit was overbuilt and depended too heavily on car manufacturing, which left it vulnerable to collapse. Chicago meanwhile is still a pretty decent sized transit hub, and it has the financial markets used to stabilize the price of a bunch of important commodities like grains and pork, which provided a diverse enough economy to stumble forwards despite nakedly corrupt and incompetent leadership.
The question is, how much wealth will leave SF? If some startups leave, it’ll probably look more like Chicago. Clearly bankrupt, but still functioning to some degree. If most startups and their employees leave, it’ll be the Detroit route for SF.
I have lived in both LA and Detroit. These are really different animals. I read somewhere that you could fit the entire city of San Francisco in the vacant lots of Detroit.
Also, you can easily find lots of property in Detroit for 5000 USD or less. I was at an auction where abandoned homes were going for less than 500 dollars.
One thing that most peeps from the East/West coast don't realize about Detroit is how big it is, compared to it's population size.
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.
The Detroit/Warren/Dearborn MSA has a higher GDP than San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara MSA and is home to ~4 million people. Don't be confused by articles highlighting specific neighborhoods or old factories, there is a ton of economic activity. There are obviously some huge problems trying to provide government services for the same land area with a shrinking population, especially following a large recession, but "Won't have a viable economy" is silly given the number of companies in the area.
Detroit is a ghost town, but the suburbs are fine. The story of Detroit is one of urban decay. Detroit's population has declined, but the metro area's population has been steadily growing. Detroit's downtown is not seeing a resurgence because there basically isn't one. It's a ton of 1950's low density housing stock.
And that housing stock overseen by a corrupt government that embezzled from the public, and a school board presided by a guy who seemingly can't write. It's a city whose politics are scarred by _multiple_ race riots.
In contrast, SV is a network of small suburban towns, all of which are happily constructing new office spaces but virtually no new housing. Rent prices are 3k USD a month, highest in the nation. An economic downturn shifts the local market from 'absurdly unaffordable' to 'merely very expensive'. And due to California's own political schemes, a permanent drop in housing prices would probably help local governments balance the books if it meant they could pay folks less while still taking in the same amount of tax revenues due to Prop 13.
Sure, the Valley won't Detroit-enize. But that doesn't mean that decay isn't at work already. Zoning like that mentioned in the article leads to
1) urban sprawl, which means
2) more land being used inefficently (wasted) and
3) more hours of life commuting (wasted), which leads to
4) more need for cars, leading to
5) more hours in congestion (wasted)
6) poorer people getting the worst of those points above, making
7) building public transport even more political feasable, while
8) public transport is the least efficient in low-density areas (wasted)
One could say that the decay of Detroit is at least contained in terms of space. Also, just because a bust is to be expected, it doesn't mean that people should be deprived of Jobs that never come to existance due to handicapped growth.
I think it's also clear that Detroit is not a growth model you'd want to emulate. With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that Detroit ended up with way too much low-productivity infrastructure that the current residents of the area can't afford to maintain.
Detroit going bust is bad if all of your property is in Detroit, but if you have property in 100s or 1000s of cities then the individual booms and busts become less relevant.
That's just a function of changing economic conditions. Do you care about Detroit the same way you care about SF? It had a roaring culture in the 40s-60s, but is now little more than a derelict husk.
The emptying out of Detroit is contained almost entirely within the low-density residential neighborhoods. The downtown area stubbornly clings on in large part because density makes it easier to serve with new business and core infrastructure.
Low density is what made the emptying so contagious and the costs so unsustainable. Low density requires continual growth to pay for the long utility runs and the long service routes for everything from busses to police patrols to trash pickup. And because service erodes as buildings empty, more buildings empty. And when the remaining 20 or 30% of your population is scattered, it's very hard to introduce new businesses or retrench old ones to serve them. The erosion is almost impossible to contain without Flint-style abandoning of large swaths of area and relocation programs for anyone who remains. (Detroit has been trying similar, but it's expensive and slow.)
I don't know much about SF and the valley and I'll refrain from commenting there. But you guys know demonstrably nothing about Detroit and you may want to follow the example.
Detroit's population has been declining for 60 years, and the population of the Metro area is still in the millions. The city itself is at 624,177 in '20. The downfall is years and the making and has to do with more than auto manufacturing. It's not like the nearby cities stuck with a single point of failure for a century, manufacturing is big but varied and the economy diversified over time. Across the U.S. manufacturing has been sensitive to the rise of competing economies.
strongtowns actually names Detroit as a very early adopter of suburban city planning and sprawl. The argument is they are in part reeling from the impact of these policies faster than other cities.
"There is a large area that is in very dire shape... but is no worse than it was 20 years ago"
This is absolutely untrue. I live in Detroit and work with its property data on a daily basis. The physical state of the city has deteriorated significantly since the financial crisis of 2008-9.
The downtown that is resurgent encompasses 7.2 of 139 square miles. Most of the city has not bottomed out. People continue to leave, properties continue to burn, and the news of Detroit's resurgence remains greatly overstated.
Take a look here to see how Detroit has fared since 2008:
The US Census version of "Detroit" is the area within the city limits. It has been "dying" since since the '68 riots, due to a combination of white flight, decline of manufacturing, and subsequent decline in retail, services, and civic engagement. All of which leads to more people leaving -- often going just 5-20 miles, into the suburbs.
In real life, to most southeast Michiganders, "Detroit" is a much larger area encompassing dozens of neighboring suburbs. That Detroit continued growing into the late '90s. The effects of the economic downturn were visible there long before the big 2008 crash (mostly in housing prices and boarded-up storefronts on suburban main streets), but its overall population decline has been much less dramatic than 25% in 10 years.
The "dying" talk is overblown. Cities ebb and flow. Manhattan in the 1970's, anyone? This is a very low ebb for the Detroit area, but it'll come back. All the way? Probably not -- being the central hub of a world industry was a bit of a historical fluke. But there's a foundation of engineers, designers, and other educated white-collar types -- along with the vestiges of a blue-collar middle class -- to build upon.
When I moved to Los Angeles ten years ago, the Hollywood area was a wasteland. So was downtown. Old Town Pasadena was gang territory. Echo Park is where you went to get shot. Now all of those areas -- and many dozens more -- are bustling and in various stages of gentrification.
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