(In 2022 I got a completely remote job and, living the meme of every Californian, traveled and lived in 5 different cities to see where I wanted to move to. I thought I’d write up what I found)
--Detroit--
I’ve had a lot of people ask why I would even consider Detroit, so let me go over the things Detroit gets right. Go to your map app of choice and look up Grand Circus Park in Detroit and look up what’s around it. In mid-2022 there were multiple nice apartments you could rent for less than $2000 a month within 2 blocks of this park. That means you’re walking distance from the baseball stadium, the football stadium, the opera house, Fox theater, the river, the hockey rink, and multiple outdoor parks. This area is premium; a lot of work has been done to clean up this area, it’s really nice and there’s lots of decent outdoor dining. And I adore the architecture, every other building is this gorgeous turn-of-the-century design that’s just fantastic. You can happily walk around downtown Detroit for hours and just enjoy the beauty. No joke, based just on infrastructure, Detroit was the best city I visited and it wasn’t close. If you want an affordable, walkable urban city, Detroit has it.
Having said that, Detroit is the only city I am not considering moving to because it has the worst vibe of any place I’ve ever been. The city has PTSD and it’s utterly tragic, so let me explain through four stories. First, if you arrive in Detroit on a Saturday, like I did, the city will absolutely enchant you; it’s packed full of people having fun and outdoor festivals and it’s really moving. And then, like around 4PM on Sunday, something will start to feel weird and it’ll bother you and then you’ll look up and…no one is on the street. You’ll look behind you, down three blocks of the urban heart of Detroit, and they’ll be one person walking and two cars on the road, then you’ll look down the street in front of you and they’ll be no one walking and three cars on the road. The city just dies and I’ve got the pictures to prove it.
But if you’re intrepid like me, you go to a local community garden to volunteer, because the urban blight has opened up a ton of land for large urban gardens and they’re actually pretty nice. And I show up and there’s like four old ladies and I figure, alright, that’s a little lame, but at least they’ll talk my ear off and I’ll learn all about Detroit. Dude, no. They didn’t talk. Like, if I asked questions and drove the conversation, they’d tell me some stuff but it was 70% me talking. And then I went to Comerica Park to watch a Tigers game, and the park is fantastic, and I started talking to these two Canadians, they’re super friendly, and I ask them about this, how Detroit is so awesome and yet everyone, especially the people who live there, are so down and closed off. And they laugh and start telling me horror stories about where their grandparents were in the 60’s Detroit race riots and how they just barely survived.
So yeah, that’s the vibe. If you’re from Detroit, I’m sorry, but your old ladies don’t talk, your Canadians tell race riot horror stories, all your restaurants are closed at 7:00 PM on a Wednesday, and there’s a CVS on Woodward Ave that I don’t think was open once in the two weeks I was there. That’s what I mean by vibe; people act like they’re in a warzone and no one wants to live around that.
So, because I know people are going to bring this up, the issue isn’t crime. Detroit has a crime problem, no doubt, but I felt safer in Detroit than I have in Stockton, in Oakland, and in the worse parts of Sacramento, and that’s just in North Cali. I’ve walked the streets at night and I’ve walked from the Eastern Market to the downtown and done things I wouldn’t have felt safe doing in Stockton. Yes, no doubt there are neighborhoods to avoid but I’m not in those neighborhoods and I don’t want to be. People aren’t just avoiding those neighborhoods, they’re avoiding a gorgeous downtown that just isn’t that dangerous and I fundamentally don’t get it. Detroit has a crime problem but it doesn’t have a uniquely bad crime problem and if you’ve lived in one of a half dozen West Coast cities, you’ve experienced the equivalent. This isn’t crime, this is some kind of weird PTSD where really horrible things happened in the past and they just can’t get over it.
So no, I’m not seriously considering Detroit. I wish I were and, to be blunt, it’s not the city, it’s the people. An entire major metropolitan area without optimism, energy, or enthusiasm; who want to be around that?
And in all seriousness, I think the greatest and easiest act of urban renewal you could do in America today is find some way to get 3-5k Californians or Texans or just…normal people into Detroit. Because there’s a real first mover problem. Nobody in their right mind would want to move to Detroit on their own but if there were a couple thousand normal people who do basic stuff like eat out on a Wednesday, so there would be restaurants open on a Wednesday at 7:00 PM, and host basic stuff like board game nights and river walks, then Detroit would be the coolest city I visited and I’d probably be moving there. But Detroit badly, badly, needs a social scene of ordinary happy people and until they find a way to get that, no amount of urban renewal is going to make a difference because it doesn’t matter how pretty the dance floor is if the natives refuse to dance.
Having driven into Detroit before, I can add that another problem is just how miserable it is to get to from outside. Once you get into the heart of the city for whatever event you're attending at a time when the city is "alive," it's great. The problem is that you have to get past a sea of decrepit housing projects that you can see from miles out to get there. Even just looking at them off the freeway is bizarre and offputting, it's no surprise that people are wigged-out after having to get through a ring of depressing ghetto zone to get to the nice city in the middle.