Detroit is an interesting example of a North American disposable city. Conditions changed and everyone left. Could this even happen somewhere like Europe where land is more scarce?
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.
Another way to look at it is that there is absurd amounts of empty land throughout the country. Places were undesirable and cheap, and people of moderate means bought them, improved the area, and over decades it became a desirable area.
Young people need to go to shitty places that are cheap and then make the place better. Many young people want to live in SF or NYC. Go to Detroit instead.
Totally true - I visited Detroit a few months back and was surprised how much it reflects its MotorCity roots. The roads are so massive in width, lot size in the neighborhoods is ridiculous and so much space is dedicated to highways with sparse exists. You can see why a local business couldn't exist - the density never gets high enough to allow a critical mass. Add to this that many of these neighborhoods are at like 20% capacity.
I’ve always wondering if farming could be a solution for Detroit? It seems to have plenty of land and with growing shortages of basic commodities such as Wheat on the global market surely there’s an opportunity to return large parts of the land back to farming use.
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.)
I visited in 2001. Concretesanti. It would far easier to buy land in Detroit and un-incorporate, or re-incorporate. I wouldn't use it as an argument for or against. It happened, and I am sure there are lots of lessons, but it definitely needed more people, more organic growth. Actually, it did need way more plants. And probably more technical folks.
I hope Detroit gets it. Metro Detroit would be just perfect for it. It's on the East Coast. It has ridiculous transport infrastructure. There is a ton of cheap labor nearby. They can probably acquire an absolutely massive plot of land downtown for pennies on the dollar.
It's easy to find examples of undeveloped spaces within the city limits of Detroit because it's density has always been fairly low by modern urban standards. The surface area of Detroit is larger than that of San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan combined, but the population is obviously lower.
as a young person i'm constantly looking for cheap areas to live with growth prospects. i went to detroit for a weekend last year and was just stunned by how cheap some of the property is, but also how run down the east side of town is, it's unfathomable to believe that could happen to an american city until you visit. on a block of 10 houses there would be 5 empty/stripped, 4 rundown, 1 artist commune.
i just don't see what the growth prospects are for detroit. i don't think manufacturing is coming back anytime soon to the US, and in terms of natural resources/weather detroit seems limited. the music scene is cool, but not the serious tax revenue generator the city needs. as a resident are you seeing any growth industries cropping up?
Even though a large fraction of the city is abandoned, getting the city government to approve things like experimental urban farm plots and green spaces made up of combined vacant lots is extremely difficult... because deep down the city doesn't want to give up the theoretical tax revenue they might be able to get if new houses were built there and the owners started paying.
Agreed. Even downtown can be a bit scary sometimes, and that's considered the "good" area of Detroit. The problem with buying up all that space is that almost everything on the properties would have to bulldozed. They could probably turn most of detroit into farm land, but that would mean moving an entire cities worth of old concrete and building materials elsewhere.
Size as in geographic area or population? Detroit has blocks and blocks where only a single house exists, thousands of empty lots and abandoned homes. Easier to build when there’s cheap empty lots.
On the bad side, there is still this feeling of lingering racism throughout the entire area. The city itself is very poor, with the exception of a few neighborhoods. And outside of those stable/safe neighborhoods (and even within them to some degree), the city has this vast feeling of emptiness. Like it's Berlin after the bombings but everyone left.
Real Estate values are so low that you literally have one guy (Dan Gilbert) building his own Delta City downtown. It's not a bad thing to have a billionaire so committed to making a great downtown, just a little odd and strange that no other regional wealth holders have really stepped up. Gilbert is doing his damnedest to make Detroit a place favorable for start-up entrepreneurs. He's associated with groups like TechTown, Detroit Venture Partners, and BizDom U. There's also a pretty reasonably sized 'old-school' tech economy here from the auto industry. IBM, HP and Microsoft have big offices in the suburbs. Lots of people here work on mainframes, industrial HR software, factory automation, and the like. If you want to make software that has effects on real physical objects, no better place to do it than here.
On the good side you will never find a more committed group of people than those who are working to make Detroit better. Groups like the Detroit Mower Gang and the Hub of Detroit are great. It's pretty inspiring what many of these groups are doing. Architecturally, Detroit is absolutely astounding. For the price of a 1br in San Francisco or Manhattan you can purchase yourself a beautiful mansion that your friends on the coasts could only dream of. At one point Detroit was referred to as the 'paris of the midwest', and it really shows in the buildings that remain. You probably won't ever have to worry about a lack of affordable housing. If you are looking for some international flavor, Canada is just across the border and Detroit is ~4 hours drive (or a train ride) from both Chicago and Toronto. The region also has the largest Arab population in the USA. As well as large Japanese, Indian, Korean, Mexican and Vietnamese population centers.
Detroit isn't like other cities where the people in the region associate with the Central city. Philly and Baltimore have bad reps but people in Montgomery County or Baltimore County still defend their city. Up until recently (and still in the older generation) many people in the suburbs of Detroit simply don't care about the Central City, and actually take pleasure in seeing it burn. Regionally, the greater Detroit area's economy is actually pretty ok. It's just that none (or very little) of that wealth made it through to the city.
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