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Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo, and so on got absolutely destroyed after all the mills were shut down. The bar for reviving is incredibly low. Those th

Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo, and so on got absolutely destroyed after all the mills were shut down. The bar for reviving is incredibly low. Those that could leave, left. The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left. Detroit has UM, Cleveland has Case Western, Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon which are all top-flight schools. In a strange way, they all have great local resources, but these are all, culturally, working class blue collar cities, and there is really nothing wrong with that. These cities ought to do better to embrace that identity. I'm from Cleveland. The city was fighting hard against the impending collapse by building out the Rock Hall, rebuilding the Browns stadium and discouraging the Dog Pound, along with and other things to make it more like a major city, ripping out the soul along the way. When LTV steel went under, the dominoes fell one after another, which destroyed the day and night life of the flats.1 Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. There is nothing wrong with a town that has $3 beers in a plastic cup and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter.

ebbv 8y ago
I'm sorry I have to do it; Detroit does not have U of Mich. U of Mich is 45 minutes west in Ann Arbor. Some U of M grads go over to Detroit, but it's not like U of M students live in Detroit. They are very separate. Detroit is mostly reviving because Ann Arbor, where U of M is, is way too expensive. The Ferndale area of Detroit is becoming what Ann Arbor was when I grew up in the 80s; all about its local community and full of young people trying to do new stuff. A big reason is that Ferndale was very cheap to live in, and while it's come up a lot it's still a lot cheaper than Ann Arbor (and a lot of other parts of Michigan.)
- wcunning 8y ago
  Check Zillow right now -- Ferndale is not particularly cheaper than Ann Arbor these days. More importantly, my Ann Arbor Area to Detroit-ish commute is shorter (in time, not distance) than my friends working in the same building coming from Ferndale. When Ferndale was "cheap," I could have bought a literal mansion in Detroit with my sophomore intern money, cash in hand. To the GP's comments, Detroit has done a lot to come up in the world on its own, though I'm not sure I like the idea of Ford buying the old train station, nor am I entirely in love with the $2~3000/mo apartments in midtown and I kinda wish it still had more of its grunge pricing to go with the definite grunge feeling that still lingers... To argue more specifically with the parent's point, the statistical area certainly counts Ann Arbor, and that count is no less reasonable than Oakland being counted with SF. Commute times from Ann Arbor <-> the rest of Metro Detroit are entirely reasonable compared to the rest of the major cities in the country. Whether you're willing to accept any commute longer than walking across the street is a personal decision, clearly a significant fraction of the population will accept it.
  - ebbv 8y ago
    I’m giving you the experience of someone who grew up in Ann Arbor and has lived and worked in this area for 40 years. Outsiders like to conflate the two but they are not really that tied together. There’s influence but Ann Arbor is largely economically and culturally independent of Detroit.
  - amyjess 8y ago
    Saying "statistical area" doesn't give the whole picture because it doesn't tell you what kind of statistical area. Detroit and Ann Arbor are only in the same Combined Statistical Area, not the same Metropolitan Statistical Area. Detroit—Warren—Dearborn, MI and Ann Arbor, MI are separate MSAs in the Detroit—Warren—Ann Arbor, MI CSA. This means that while there are some interlocking commuting patterns between Detroit and Ann Arbor, they are much weaker than the commuting patterns within a single MSA. On the contrary, Oakland is part of the same MSA as SF: San Francisco—Oakland—Hayward, CA. Though most of what was traditionally considered SV is in a separate MSA: San Jose—Sunnyvale—Santa Clara, CA. And both are part of the San Jose—San Francisco—Oakland, CA CSA. Sorry, I'm something of a census nerd, and I even built a site using machine-parsed census data just so I could drill down to various levels. Some links: http://zaidan-x.org:8192/csa/220 http://zaidan-x.org:8192/csa/220 (Detroit) http://zaidan-x.org:8192/csa/488 http://zaidan-x.org:8192/csa/488 (SF)
    - wcunning 8y ago
      That's quite a lot more than I knew about statistical areas! Thanks for keeping me honest and informed. I mostly mean that in the following sense: due to some historical Michigan laws, the "City of Detroit" is vastly poorer than, say, Houston. However, the actually equivalent comparison due to Houston's absorbing its own suburbs over the last hundred years is to Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties. This does eliminate Washtenaw County that Ann Arbor is in, but the idea is that the "Detroit Metropolitan Region" is actually not on hard times and hasn't been any more so than any other major city in a very long time. It's just that no one wants to pay Detroit city income taxes, so they live literally across the street in Ferndale or Dearborn. Or, like me, they suck it up and commute from Ann Arbor so that they live somewhere with lower crime, but the job still counts as that region.
- pgm8705 8y ago
  > Detroit is mostly reviving because Ann Arbor, where U of M is, is way too expensive. I wouldn't say "mostly." It's mostly due to huge numbers of job moving to or being created downtown by Dan Gilbert's umbrella of companies(mostly Quicken Loans). Additionally, many businesses in metro detroit are moving from the suburbs to downtown. I'm not so sure Detroit is any cheaper than Ann Arbor these days, either. At least not in the downtown & midtown areas.
  - ebbv 8y ago
    Different sections of Detroit have different costs, Royal Oak isn't very cheap. But some sections are way, way cheaper than Ann Arbor. The part of Ferndale my good friends live in is still much cheaper than Ann Arbor even though it's about 3x more than it cost ~5 years ago.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  People are moving from Ann Arbor to Detroit, really?
  - ebbv 8y ago
    Not necessarily from, but are choosing it instead of. But yes young people who grew up in Ann Arbor are moving out to Detroit for sheer cost of rent/house reasons.
  - outinh43thn 8y ago
    My younger brother did about 15 years ago. He eventually moved on to Portland, OR, but it does happen. If you're at the school, it's the nearest large city, so why not?
  - mikeyouse 8y ago
    Yeah, downtown is really on the upswing.. There are a number of places listing (and renting) $2,000/month apartments and a ton of $500k condos moving through the market.
    - karpodiem 8y ago
      Correct. They are largely overpriced though.
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  - benrbray 8y ago
    I grew up in Michigan and attended UM. I can say anecdotally that very, very few people I knew (mostly from math + engineering) stayed in Michigan after graduating. On the other hand, many people I knew who graduated from Michigan State ended up taking jobs in and around Detroit. I found an article [1] which claims that 40% of UM's living alumni currently live in Michigan. I would wager that the rates for recent graduates are even lower, since moving away from family has become more common, but I couldn't find data. > [1] http://www.annarbor.com/news/where-u-m-alumni-live/ http://www.annarbor.com/news/where-u-m-alumni-live/
- outinh43thn 8y ago
  U of M still has a Dearborn campus that's closer to Detroit, doesn't it? Looking at Maps, it's only a few miles from downtown Detroit. I grew up in Flint and the U of M campus there was a big part of the city.
  - ebbv 8y ago
    UM Dearborn is largely a separate entity. They're related but when people talk about UM it's not what they're referring to. It has its own much smaller student body and faculty, etc.
- GaltMidas 8y ago
  Posting from Ferndale and some super seriously expensive commercial real estate. I'd say it used to be cheap, but Ferndale is long past cheap now. Hip? Yes, and we pay on par with Troy commercial rent for that coolness in a former industrial building turned office. Residential is pretty much the same now. Your point about Ann Arbor relative to Detroit is spot on. Detroit doesn't really have UofM. It has Wayne State, but neither UofM or Michigan State can be claimed by Detroit.
barry-cotter 8y ago
What’s your thesis? Those top flight schools are staffed by people who are at best indifferent to the people drinking $3 beers in a plastic cup and on average actively despise them. They have very, very low rates of divorce but their hands aren’t calloused and they don’t get married in front of an altar.
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
>Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. There is nothing wrong with a town that has $3 beers in a plastic cup and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter. Sure, but the money for that has to come from somewhere. Nowadays, "working-class, blue-collar" stuff does not make money, and if "working-class, blue-collar" people identify with the economic system which designates their labor as a cost to be repressed rather than a service to be rewarded, I'm not sure how much I can do about that.
- PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
  To clarify, the people working by staring at computers are also seen as a cost to be repressed and not a service to be rewarded. Supply and demand has made the cost resistant to repression up til now, but the economic system is hard at work finding out how to change that. One might even go so far as to postulate if the IT industries push to get more people into IT is so that labor supply goes up leading to labor costs going down.
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  - pm90 8y ago
    > One might even go so far as to postulate if the IT industries push to get more people into IT is so that labor supply goes up leading to labor costs going down. This has been discussed in great detail, especially here on HN. The consensus seems to be that even if you increase the supply by a lot, the nature of Software Engineering, its inherent complexity will restrict the supply of the highly skilled workers. This theory seems to have held out in the Indian/Chinese labor markets; but its possible there are other systemic reason for that. Meanwhile the demand for Technology skills keeps increasing rapidly. Perhaps in the next economic bust there will be a much-delayed correction. The future does look pretty rosy for Software Engineers at the present time.
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ocschwar 8y ago
> Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. From looking at my FB feed, I've mostly surmised that computer gaming is largely a passtime for people with blue collar lives. So you're wrong on one of these. And FWIW, even though I'm at ground zero for Boston's hipster influx, I'm still a short walk from a lot of places where you can drink cheap beer and yell at a TV showing sportsball.
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magduf 8y ago
>and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. You can scream at a TV all you want, but that's never going to turn you into a horse. On a more serious note, the industries that made these cities what they are are mostly gone now, and they're not coming back. The thing that made these cities attractive for these industries is no longer all that relevant: their location on the water. These days, there just isn't much to make these cities attractive for new industries, except maybe cheap real estate, but you can get that in many other places in the US while not being burdened by 1) terrible weather and 2) crumbling old infrastructure that's going to cost a fortune to modernize. I think these cities can reinvent themselves to a degree, taking advantage of the many old buildings and such, but I don't think they'll ever get back to the population levels and economic statuses they had in the past, just like Rome is probably never going to be the leading city in Europe again.
- trop 8y ago
  > their location on the water Which I misread as "the location of their water". Which is actually quite serious. See https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/in-dayton-ohio-an-economic-comeback-is-in-the-water/906e35a2-b22e-4649-9dbf-04961aa89fed https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/in-dayton-ohio-an-econo... > As states like California face major water shortages, city officials in Dayton sense a business opportunity. ... the self-filtering, self-recharging freshwater supply, along with the rivers, once made Dayton attractive to water-intensive industries in the 19th century. > Mills, factories, and countless little breweries lined the river before Prohibition, and Dayton was a hub of innovation and wealth. > ... > “We’re running into limits,” says Peter Gleick, the head of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Oakland, California. “...In the past we’ve sort of assumed enough water would always be available, and I think we can no longer assume that’s going to be the case.” > ... > “Back to the midwest” — that phrase is music to Karen Thomas’s ears. Thomas is the head of water marketing for Dayton (yes, that’s actually a job). > “We have an abundant water source,” she says. “We don’t believe that we would have to worry about water.” > ... > “Water is a public good, but it’s also a commodity,” she says. > An economic development team in Dayton has conducted talks with several food processors, manufacturers, and beverage makers that could use an inexpensive and abundant supply of water. Companies that choose Dayton would face little of the regulation placed on water diversions in the Great Lakes basin; here, if you can drill a well, you can drain it. The article continues on to pollution issues in the Midwest, so more twists ahead.
taeric 8y ago
I'm not entirely sure I understand this post. First two paragraphs indicate that the place hit rough time and ironically lost the people that could make it better. Which, to be fair, sounds like more places with high poverty or few jobs. (Those do somewhat feed on each other, no?) The third indicates education helps a lot. But, you restrict yourself to basically adult education. To keep people somewhere, you need not to just convince them it is a place they can thrive, but that their kids could, too. Fourth, I don't know. You reference the soul of a city, but give little extra thought to that and move on. Your last paragraph, though, just loses me. You use obviously negative rhetoric to describe what you think of most currently succeeding cities. It is the obviously negative tone that annoys me. Your second sentence is one I can agree with. The first just doesn't belong next to it. You want me to accept one lifestyle while simultaneously being willing to reject another. Or, at least, be ok with it being rejected.
afuchs 8y ago
> Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo, and so on got absolutely destroyed after all the mills were shut down. The bar for reviving is incredibly low. Those that could leave, left. The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left. > Detroit has UM, Cleveland has Case Western, Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon which are all top-flight schools. In a strange way, they all have great local resources, but these are all, culturally, working class blue collar cities, and there is really nothing wrong with that. These cities ought to do better to embrace that identity. > I'm from Cleveland. The city was fighting hard against the impending collapse by building out the Rock Hall, rebuilding the Browns stadium and discouraging the Dog Pound, along with and other things to make it more like a major city, ripping out the soul along the way. When LTV steel went under, the dominoes fell one after another, which destroyed the day and night life of the flats.1 Yes. It seems like every mid-sized city has a large university. Regardless, most of the better paying jobs in the country are, over time, becoming concentrated in only a handful of places. > Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. There is nothing wrong with a town that has $3 beers in a plastic cup and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. Not everyone in NYC or LA or Boston want to stare at a computer either. A lot of them can and do go to bars to drink cheap beer and watch football. > There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter. Few people anywhere have a problem with straight marriage. This statement taken in the context of the current cultural zeitgeist, sounds like an argument that gay marriage should not be allowed to exist. This type of statement often comes from someone who views the actions of others, that don't directly affect them, as a personal affront; someone who sees the existence of a different way of life as a personal attack. They often try to force others to to conform to their views, and then label any pushback they receive as bullying. Yes, middle america is downtrodden. However, a lot of what is presented as well meaning discourse is actually nefarious in nature.
- aantix 8y ago
  >This statement taken in the context of the current cultural zeitgeist, sounds like an argument that gay marriage should not be allowed to exist I didn't take it like that at all - I figured the emphasis was on the "calloused hands", meaning a typical, married, blue-collared life was nothing to be ashamed of.
danans 8y ago
> Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. There is nothing wrong with a town that has $3 beers in a plastic cup and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. Not only is this a non-sequitir from the previous paragraph, but drinking beer (cheap is relative) and screaming at a television is a tradition shared by people of every economic and social class in the US. Furthermore, no policy has impinged on or repressed anyone's right or ability to do that, and nobody is forcing people to drink expensive coffee or eat farm-to-table food. Also, computers screens a reality of work in a developed economy. People working in modern industrial facilities have to operate sophisticated machinery, and that often involves computers screens, in jobs that have nothing to do with programming. I have family that manage aircraft maintenance teams in the military, and they spend a lot of time in front of screens, because it's the best tool for aspects of the job. > There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter. The only people attacking straight-marriage are libertarians like Ron Paul, who don't think government should be recognizing _any_ marriages, so this statement goes beyond a straw-man, and straight into dog-whistle territory.
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jamesrcole 8y ago
> Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. There is nothing wrong with a town that has $3 beers in a plastic cup and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter. I find that pretty pretentious. And the problem with it is that it makes the situation out to be one purely of aesthetic and moral preferences, completely ignoring ecomonic factors that can't be simply chosen based on such preferences.
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walrus01 8y ago
> screaming until at the TV until they are horse just say neigh to screaming at sports events until you are hoarse.
notatoad 8y ago
> but these are all, culturally, working class blue collar cities, and there is really nothing wrong with that. But if the blue collar jobs are drying up, there absolutely is something wrong with identifying "blue collar" as part of the local culture. There's nothing about working an office job or looking at a computer screen that requires you to drink $5 lattes. Turning up your nose at jobs that don't fit the local blue-collar "culture" isn't going to help any sort of recovery. This attitude seems to be part of the dangerous midwest mindset that if you wish hard enough, the manufacturing sector will rebound, and that's simply not realistic. Globalisation exists, and low-skill jobs can be done more cheaply in other countries. If you want a job you might have to take a white-collar one, and if you insist that your city is blue-collar the white collar jobs will go elsewhere (which they have already done, and which is why we keep hearing stories about detroit's decline).
trhway 8y ago
Life isn't about wants, it is about what you have to do. Somebody has to stare at screen and drink the lattes in order for the country to have a fighting chance in that global economy [war].
rmason 8y ago
Actually U of M is in Ann Arbor which is 40 miles West. Though there is a satellite campus in Dearborn which is in the suburbs. Detroit has Wayne State University which is growing with the addition of a new business school courtesy of the late Mike Ilitch the founder of Little Caesars. https://ilitchbusiness.wayne.edu/ https://ilitchbusiness.wayne.edu/ There are also two smaller colleges, Marygrove and University of Detroit Mercy.
- alexhutcheson 8y ago
  Ann Arbor, not incidentally, appears to be doing really well relative to comparable cities and towns in the Midwest.
  - randcraw 8y ago
    Yeah, but the jobs created in A2 are few and significantly underpay comparable jobs in Chicago or Pittsburgh. The appeal of living near UofM has long depressed wages there and this shows no sign of changing soon. It's noteworthy that, beyond UofM's 50,000 students, the population of A2 is no more than 100K. That just isn't enough to draw large employers (like the Amazon HQ2) or gestate explosive growth. Thus job prospects aren't likely to boom in A2, ever, nor will A2 (or UofM) play a significant role in driving Detroit's renaissance.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    Not really. I don't really see AA doing that much better than, say, Madison Wi. Which, I'm sure most would agree, is a comparable town. If anything, places like Madison and Champaign in Illinois are doing a bit better. (Well, more population growth anyway.)
    - mgoblu3 8y ago
      Madison is about twice the size of Ann Arbor and also the state capitol: it's going to drive quite a bit more economic growth than AA
- Armisael16 8y ago
8bitsrule 8y ago
"ripping out the soul along the way" Sad. Equally sad is: that's also happening in cities that are enjoying The Best of Times. A lot of the people doing the actual work can't afford to live in them ... even if their neighborhoods weren't being gentrified into sterility. Property investors want a high return on their rentals. But no spreadsheets can calculate the hidden cost of that return. When there's nothing left for greed to monetize, the day of reckoning will arrive. It'll probably look like 'I Am Legend'.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  In all fairness, the people leaving these cities are typically not the same people who give the cities their "soul". Anyone who has been to Detroit would be hard pressed to say that the city does not have "soul". It has "soul" and "character" in abundance. None of that ever left. But you know what? Cool kids with "soul" typically don't bring in a whole lot of money. Add to that the fact that a lot of their "soul" is coming from a place of some very real pain, and you can see the potential for issues. So, yes, cities want to keep their "soul", and that's fine. (That's actually a GOOD thing.) But let's look at it face on, and not romanticize what that "soul" is too much. "Soul" makes cities what they are. No question. But it can have a dark side too. Just as the gleaming tech economy startups have a dark side that we shouldn't be romanticizing too much.
Mc_Big_G 8y ago
>Those that could leave, left. The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left. I'm from Toledo and left for SF without looking back. I begged people in the SBA and business community to discuss tech with me and they didn't get it and I'd be shocked if they get it now. It was literally like "How can you make money with a website?" and this was just 8 years ago. Forget about using open source as they're all about MS and Oracle and corporate BS. Friends and family from that area are still totally shocked by things like pets and alcohol in the office, working from home, wearing t-shirts/jeans/tennis shoes, standing desks etc... It's really a shit mentality and it will persist for some time. It would take an obscene amount of money for me to move back to Toledo and almost everyone I love is there.
- adpirz 8y ago
  Fellow 419-to-Bay-Area transplant. Parents are still there, but even my friends who want to stay local move to Columbus (which is actually growing quite quickly!). The median age feels like it continues to rise as young people leave more and more.
xhrpost 8y ago
> "The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left." I think this is a little too simplistic. I used this reason partially to not leave one of the cities on your list for many years. Working in software and not wanting to be part of the "brain drain". Eventually, I realized the problem was simply bigger than me and that finding quality tech work and companies was something I needed for personal health (both career and other).
darepublic 8y ago
Give this a listen: https://youtu.be/27ZiixkruCY https://youtu.be/27ZiixkruCY

ebbv 8y ago

I'm sorry I have to do it; Detroit does not have U of Mich. U of Mich is 45 minutes west in Ann Arbor. Some U of M grads go over to Detroit, but it's not like U of M students live in Detroit. They are very separate. Detroit is mostly reviving because Ann Arbor, where U of M is, is way too expensive. The Ferndale area of Detroit is becoming what Ann Arbor was when I grew up in the 80s; all about its local community and full of young people trying to do new stuff. A big reason is that Ferndale was very cheap to live in, and while it's come up a lot it's still a lot cheaper than Ann Arbor (and a lot of other parts of Michigan.)

wcunning 8y ago
Check Zillow right now -- Ferndale is not particularly cheaper than Ann Arbor these days. More importantly, my Ann Arbor Area to Detroit-ish commute is shorter (in time, not distance) than my friends working in the same building coming from Ferndale. When Ferndale was "cheap," I could have bought a literal mansion in Detroit with my sophomore intern money, cash in hand. To the GP's comments, Detroit has done a lot to come up in the world on its own, though I'm not sure I like the idea of Ford buying the old train station, nor am I entirely in love with the $2~3000/mo apartments in midtown and I kinda wish it still had more of its grunge pricing to go with the definite grunge feeling that still lingers... To argue more specifically with the parent's point, the statistical area certainly counts Ann Arbor, and that count is no less reasonable than Oakland being counted with SF. Commute times from Ann Arbor <-> the rest of Metro Detroit are entirely reasonable compared to the rest of the major cities in the country. Whether you're willing to accept any commute longer than walking across the street is a personal decision, clearly a significant fraction of the population will accept it.
- ebbv 8y ago
  I’m giving you the experience of someone who grew up in Ann Arbor and has lived and worked in this area for 40 years. Outsiders like to conflate the two but they are not really that tied together. There’s influence but Ann Arbor is largely economically and culturally independent of Detroit.
- amyjess 8y ago
  Saying "statistical area" doesn't give the whole picture because it doesn't tell you what kind of statistical area. Detroit and Ann Arbor are only in the same Combined Statistical Area, not the same Metropolitan Statistical Area. Detroit—Warren—Dearborn, MI and Ann Arbor, MI are separate MSAs in the Detroit—Warren—Ann Arbor, MI CSA. This means that while there are some interlocking commuting patterns between Detroit and Ann Arbor, they are much weaker than the commuting patterns within a single MSA. On the contrary, Oakland is part of the same MSA as SF: San Francisco—Oakland—Hayward, CA. Though most of what was traditionally considered SV is in a separate MSA: San Jose—Sunnyvale—Santa Clara, CA. And both are part of the San Jose—San Francisco—Oakland, CA CSA. Sorry, I'm something of a census nerd, and I even built a site using machine-parsed census data just so I could drill down to various levels. Some links: http://zaidan-x.org:8192/csa/220 http://zaidan-x.org:8192/csa/220 (Detroit) http://zaidan-x.org:8192/csa/488 http://zaidan-x.org:8192/csa/488 (SF)
  - wcunning 8y ago
    That's quite a lot more than I knew about statistical areas! Thanks for keeping me honest and informed. I mostly mean that in the following sense: due to some historical Michigan laws, the "City of Detroit" is vastly poorer than, say, Houston. However, the actually equivalent comparison due to Houston's absorbing its own suburbs over the last hundred years is to Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties. This does eliminate Washtenaw County that Ann Arbor is in, but the idea is that the "Detroit Metropolitan Region" is actually not on hard times and hasn't been any more so than any other major city in a very long time. It's just that no one wants to pay Detroit city income taxes, so they live literally across the street in Ferndale or Dearborn. Or, like me, they suck it up and commute from Ann Arbor so that they live somewhere with lower crime, but the job still counts as that region.
pgm8705 8y ago
> Detroit is mostly reviving because Ann Arbor, where U of M is, is way too expensive. I wouldn't say "mostly." It's mostly due to huge numbers of job moving to or being created downtown by Dan Gilbert's umbrella of companies(mostly Quicken Loans). Additionally, many businesses in metro detroit are moving from the suburbs to downtown. I'm not so sure Detroit is any cheaper than Ann Arbor these days, either. At least not in the downtown & midtown areas.
- ebbv 8y ago
  Different sections of Detroit have different costs, Royal Oak isn't very cheap. But some sections are way, way cheaper than Ann Arbor. The part of Ferndale my good friends live in is still much cheaper than Ann Arbor even though it's about 3x more than it cost ~5 years ago.
jrochkind1 8y ago
People are moving from Ann Arbor to Detroit, really?
- ebbv 8y ago
  Not necessarily from, but are choosing it instead of. But yes young people who grew up in Ann Arbor are moving out to Detroit for sheer cost of rent/house reasons.
- outinh43thn 8y ago
  My younger brother did about 15 years ago. He eventually moved on to Portland, OR, but it does happen. If you're at the school, it's the nearest large city, so why not?
- mikeyouse 8y ago
  Yeah, downtown is really on the upswing.. There are a number of places listing (and renting) $2,000/month apartments and a ton of $500k condos moving through the market.
  - karpodiem 8y ago
    Correct. They are largely overpriced though.
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- benrbray 8y ago
  I grew up in Michigan and attended UM. I can say anecdotally that very, very few people I knew (mostly from math + engineering) stayed in Michigan after graduating. On the other hand, many people I knew who graduated from Michigan State ended up taking jobs in and around Detroit. I found an article [1] which claims that 40% of UM's living alumni currently live in Michigan. I would wager that the rates for recent graduates are even lower, since moving away from family has become more common, but I couldn't find data. > [1] http://www.annarbor.com/news/where-u-m-alumni-live/ http://www.annarbor.com/news/where-u-m-alumni-live/
outinh43thn 8y ago
U of M still has a Dearborn campus that's closer to Detroit, doesn't it? Looking at Maps, it's only a few miles from downtown Detroit. I grew up in Flint and the U of M campus there was a big part of the city.
- ebbv 8y ago
  UM Dearborn is largely a separate entity. They're related but when people talk about UM it's not what they're referring to. It has its own much smaller student body and faculty, etc.
GaltMidas 8y ago
Posting from Ferndale and some super seriously expensive commercial real estate. I'd say it used to be cheap, but Ferndale is long past cheap now. Hip? Yes, and we pay on par with Troy commercial rent for that coolness in a former industrial building turned office. Residential is pretty much the same now. Your point about Ann Arbor relative to Detroit is spot on. Detroit doesn't really have UofM. It has Wayne State, but neither UofM or Michigan State can be claimed by Detroit.

barry-cotter 8y ago

What’s your thesis? Those top flight schools are staffed by people who are at best indifferent to the people drinking $3 beers in a plastic cup and on average actively despise them. They have very, very low rates of divorce but their hands aren’t calloused and they don’t get married in front of an altar.

eli_gottlieb 8y ago

>Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. There is nothing wrong with a town that has $3 beers in a plastic cup and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter. Sure, but the money for that has to come from somewhere. Nowadays, "working-class, blue-collar" stuff does not make money, and if "working-class, blue-collar" people identify with the economic system which designates their labor as a cost to be repressed rather than a service to be rewarded, I'm not sure how much I can do about that.

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
To clarify, the people working by staring at computers are also seen as a cost to be repressed and not a service to be rewarded. Supply and demand has made the cost resistant to repression up til now, but the economic system is hard at work finding out how to change that. One might even go so far as to postulate if the IT industries push to get more people into IT is so that labor supply goes up leading to labor costs going down.
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- pm90 8y ago
  > One might even go so far as to postulate if the IT industries push to get more people into IT is so that labor supply goes up leading to labor costs going down. This has been discussed in great detail, especially here on HN. The consensus seems to be that even if you increase the supply by a lot, the nature of Software Engineering, its inherent complexity will restrict the supply of the highly skilled workers. This theory seems to have held out in the Indian/Chinese labor markets; but its possible there are other systemic reason for that. Meanwhile the demand for Technology skills keeps increasing rapidly. Perhaps in the next economic bust there will be a much-delayed correction. The future does look pretty rosy for Software Engineers at the present time.

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ocschwar 8y ago

> Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. From looking at my FB feed, I've mostly surmised that computer gaming is largely a passtime for people with blue collar lives. So you're wrong on one of these. And FWIW, even though I'm at ground zero for Boston's hipster influx, I'm still a short walk from a lot of places where you can drink cheap beer and yell at a TV showing sportsball.

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magduf 8y ago

>and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. You can scream at a TV all you want, but that's never going to turn you into a horse. On a more serious note, the industries that made these cities what they are are mostly gone now, and they're not coming back. The thing that made these cities attractive for these industries is no longer all that relevant: their location on the water. These days, there just isn't much to make these cities attractive for new industries, except maybe cheap real estate, but you can get that in many other places in the US while not being burdened by 1) terrible weather and 2) crumbling old infrastructure that's going to cost a fortune to modernize. I think these cities can reinvent themselves to a degree, taking advantage of the many old buildings and such, but I don't think they'll ever get back to the population levels and economic statuses they had in the past, just like Rome is probably never going to be the leading city in Europe again.

trop 8y ago
> their location on the water Which I misread as "the location of their water". Which is actually quite serious. See https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/in-dayton-ohio-an-economic-comeback-is-in-the-water/906e35a2-b22e-4649-9dbf-04961aa89fed https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/in-dayton-ohio-an-econo... > As states like California face major water shortages, city officials in Dayton sense a business opportunity. ... the self-filtering, self-recharging freshwater supply, along with the rivers, once made Dayton attractive to water-intensive industries in the 19th century. > Mills, factories, and countless little breweries lined the river before Prohibition, and Dayton was a hub of innovation and wealth. > ... > “We’re running into limits,” says Peter Gleick, the head of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Oakland, California. “...In the past we’ve sort of assumed enough water would always be available, and I think we can no longer assume that’s going to be the case.” > ... > “Back to the midwest” — that phrase is music to Karen Thomas’s ears. Thomas is the head of water marketing for Dayton (yes, that’s actually a job). > “We have an abundant water source,” she says. “We don’t believe that we would have to worry about water.” > ... > “Water is a public good, but it’s also a commodity,” she says. > An economic development team in Dayton has conducted talks with several food processors, manufacturers, and beverage makers that could use an inexpensive and abundant supply of water. Companies that choose Dayton would face little of the regulation placed on water diversions in the Great Lakes basin; here, if you can drill a well, you can drain it. The article continues on to pollution issues in the Midwest, so more twists ahead.

taeric 8y ago

I'm not entirely sure I understand this post. First two paragraphs indicate that the place hit rough time and ironically lost the people that could make it better. Which, to be fair, sounds like more places with high poverty or few jobs. (Those do somewhat feed on each other, no?) The third indicates education helps a lot. But, you restrict yourself to basically adult education. To keep people somewhere, you need not to just convince them it is a place they can thrive, but that their kids could, too. Fourth, I don't know. You reference the soul of a city, but give little extra thought to that and move on. Your last paragraph, though, just loses me. You use obviously negative rhetoric to describe what you think of most currently succeeding cities. It is the obviously negative tone that annoys me. Your second sentence is one I can agree with. The first just doesn't belong next to it. You want me to accept one lifestyle while simultaneously being willing to reject another. Or, at least, be ok with it being rejected.

afuchs 8y ago

> Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo, and so on got absolutely destroyed after all the mills were shut down. The bar for reviving is incredibly low. Those that could leave, left. The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left. > Detroit has UM, Cleveland has Case Western, Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon which are all top-flight schools. In a strange way, they all have great local resources, but these are all, culturally, working class blue collar cities, and there is really nothing wrong with that. These cities ought to do better to embrace that identity. > I'm from Cleveland. The city was fighting hard against the impending collapse by building out the Rock Hall, rebuilding the Browns stadium and discouraging the Dog Pound, along with and other things to make it more like a major city, ripping out the soul along the way. When LTV steel went under, the dominoes fell one after another, which destroyed the day and night life of the flats.1 Yes. It seems like every mid-sized city has a large university. Regardless, most of the better paying jobs in the country are, over time, becoming concentrated in only a handful of places. > Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. There is nothing wrong with a town that has $3 beers in a plastic cup and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. Not everyone in NYC or LA or Boston want to stare at a computer either. A lot of them can and do go to bars to drink cheap beer and watch football. > There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter. Few people anywhere have a problem with straight marriage. This statement taken in the context of the current cultural zeitgeist, sounds like an argument that gay marriage should not be allowed to exist. This type of statement often comes from someone who views the actions of others, that don't directly affect them, as a personal affront; someone who sees the existence of a different way of life as a personal attack. They often try to force others to to conform to their views, and then label any pushback they receive as bullying. Yes, middle america is downtrodden. However, a lot of what is presented as well meaning discourse is actually nefarious in nature.

aantix 8y ago
>This statement taken in the context of the current cultural zeitgeist, sounds like an argument that gay marriage should not be allowed to exist I didn't take it like that at all - I figured the emphasis was on the "calloused hands", meaning a typical, married, blue-collared life was nothing to be ashamed of.

danans 8y ago

> Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. There is nothing wrong with a town that has $3 beers in a plastic cup and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. Not only is this a non-sequitir from the previous paragraph, but drinking beer (cheap is relative) and screaming at a television is a tradition shared by people of every economic and social class in the US. Furthermore, no policy has impinged on or repressed anyone's right or ability to do that, and nobody is forcing people to drink expensive coffee or eat farm-to-table food. Also, computers screens a reality of work in a developed economy. People working in modern industrial facilities have to operate sophisticated machinery, and that often involves computers screens, in jobs that have nothing to do with programming. I have family that manage aircraft maintenance teams in the military, and they spend a lot of time in front of screens, because it's the best tool for aspects of the job. > There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter. The only people attacking straight-marriage are libertarians like Ron Paul, who don't think government should be recognizing _any_ marriages, so this statement goes beyond a straw-man, and straight into dog-whistle territory.

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jamesrcole 8y ago

> Everyone in America doesn't want to stare at a computer, drink $5 latte's, and eat farm to table food. There is nothing wrong with a town that has $3 beers in a plastic cup and a crowd of people screaming until at the TV until they are horse. There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter. I find that pretty pretentious. And the problem with it is that it makes the situation out to be one purely of aesthetic and moral preferences, completely ignoring ecomonic factors that can't be simply chosen based on such preferences.

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walrus01 8y ago

> screaming until at the TV until they are horse just say neigh to screaming at sports events until you are hoarse.

notatoad 8y ago

> but these are all, culturally, working class blue collar cities, and there is really nothing wrong with that. But if the blue collar jobs are drying up, there absolutely is something wrong with identifying "blue collar" as part of the local culture. There's nothing about working an office job or looking at a computer screen that requires you to drink $5 lattes. Turning up your nose at jobs that don't fit the local blue-collar "culture" isn't going to help any sort of recovery. This attitude seems to be part of the dangerous midwest mindset that if you wish hard enough, the manufacturing sector will rebound, and that's simply not realistic. Globalisation exists, and low-skill jobs can be done more cheaply in other countries. If you want a job you might have to take a white-collar one, and if you insist that your city is blue-collar the white collar jobs will go elsewhere (which they have already done, and which is why we keep hearing stories about detroit's decline).

trhway 8y ago

Life isn't about wants, it is about what you have to do. Somebody has to stare at screen and drink the lattes in order for the country to have a fighting chance in that global economy [war].

rmason 8y ago

Actually U of M is in Ann Arbor which is 40 miles West. Though there is a satellite campus in Dearborn which is in the suburbs. Detroit has Wayne State University which is growing with the addition of a new business school courtesy of the late Mike Ilitch the founder of Little Caesars. https://ilitchbusiness.wayne.edu/ https://ilitchbusiness.wayne.edu/ There are also two smaller colleges, Marygrove and University of Detroit Mercy.

alexhutcheson 8y ago
Ann Arbor, not incidentally, appears to be doing really well relative to comparable cities and towns in the Midwest.
- randcraw 8y ago
  Yeah, but the jobs created in A2 are few and significantly underpay comparable jobs in Chicago or Pittsburgh. The appeal of living near UofM has long depressed wages there and this shows no sign of changing soon. It's noteworthy that, beyond UofM's 50,000 students, the population of A2 is no more than 100K. That just isn't enough to draw large employers (like the Amazon HQ2) or gestate explosive growth. Thus job prospects aren't likely to boom in A2, ever, nor will A2 (or UofM) play a significant role in driving Detroit's renaissance.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Not really. I don't really see AA doing that much better than, say, Madison Wi. Which, I'm sure most would agree, is a comparable town. If anything, places like Madison and Champaign in Illinois are doing a bit better. (Well, more population growth anyway.)
  - mgoblu3 8y ago
    Madison is about twice the size of Ann Arbor and also the state capitol: it's going to drive quite a bit more economic growth than AA
Armisael16 8y ago

8bitsrule 8y ago

"ripping out the soul along the way" Sad. Equally sad is: that's also happening in cities that are enjoying The Best of Times. A lot of the people doing the actual work can't afford to live in them ... even if their neighborhoods weren't being gentrified into sterility. Property investors want a high return on their rentals. But no spreadsheets can calculate the hidden cost of that return. When there's nothing left for greed to monetize, the day of reckoning will arrive. It'll probably look like 'I Am Legend'.

bilbo0s 8y ago
In all fairness, the people leaving these cities are typically not the same people who give the cities their "soul". Anyone who has been to Detroit would be hard pressed to say that the city does not have "soul". It has "soul" and "character" in abundance. None of that ever left. But you know what? Cool kids with "soul" typically don't bring in a whole lot of money. Add to that the fact that a lot of their "soul" is coming from a place of some very real pain, and you can see the potential for issues. So, yes, cities want to keep their "soul", and that's fine. (That's actually a GOOD thing.) But let's look at it face on, and not romanticize what that "soul" is too much. "Soul" makes cities what they are. No question. But it can have a dark side too. Just as the gleaming tech economy startups have a dark side that we shouldn't be romanticizing too much.

Mc_Big_G 8y ago

>Those that could leave, left. The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left. I'm from Toledo and left for SF without looking back. I begged people in the SBA and business community to discuss tech with me and they didn't get it and I'd be shocked if they get it now. It was literally like "How can you make money with a website?" and this was just 8 years ago. Forget about using open source as they're all about MS and Oracle and corporate BS. Friends and family from that area are still totally shocked by things like pets and alcohol in the office, working from home, wearing t-shirts/jeans/tennis shoes, standing desks etc... It's really a shit mentality and it will persist for some time. It would take an obscene amount of money for me to move back to Toledo and almost everyone I love is there.

adpirz 8y ago
Fellow 419-to-Bay-Area transplant. Parents are still there, but even my friends who want to stay local move to Columbus (which is actually growing quite quickly!). The median age feels like it continues to rise as young people leave more and more.

xhrpost 8y ago

> "The very people that could quicken the recovery of the fallen Midwestern towns are the same people who left." I think this is a little too simplistic. I used this reason partially to not leave one of the cities on your list for many years. Working in software and not wanting to be part of the "brain drain". Eventually, I realized the problem was simply bigger than me and that finding quality tech work and companies was something I needed for personal health (both career and other).

darepublic 8y ago

Give this a listen: https://youtu.be/27ZiixkruCY https://youtu.be/27ZiixkruCY