Weird that the article does not cite a single economic or demographic indicator to support its assertion. For example, Detroit's population has declined so far this decade at about the same pace as it declined from 1990-2000 (though not at the disastrous pace it declined from 2000-2010, when the city lost a quarter of its population). Sounds like far from a revival.
This is a pretty weird article, without some kind of further support it really smacks of a manufactured narrative.
As you say, the population - which the article insists is the key factor - shows no sign of recovering. It's simply ceased the plummet it was in during the economic crisis and preceding years. The rate of decline might be a bit slower than the 90s, but the second derivative is still 0. (If you made me offer a theory, I'd say 2008-2011 prematurely drove out people who would otherwise have left more gradually.)
I also noticed the line "Dreams of a house for a few thousand dollars seem like an old memory in some areas, where buildings can list for more than a million." The phrasing is circumspect; it carefully avoids saying that there are actually specific areas where home prices have gone from thousands to a million, and equivocates oddly between houses and buildings. Detroit was never all impoverished, and I have a sinking feeling that this sentence is comparing the current prices of Downtown Detroit to the past prices of northeast Detroit.
Certainly there are some bright spots in Detroit, the city's budget is less disastrous and the projects in bulldozing, resettlement, and urban forestry are a fascinating experiment. But all the evidence I can see says that a plan for Detroit which depends on a rising population anytime soon is basically doomed, whatever the changing look of the city.
I suspect this is an 'archive' article -- a lightweight piece that's whipped up at a moment's notice or lay about idly until a slow news day comes along and something with snappy pictures is needed to fill a void. This news contains little that's especially new.
Eh, it was pretty close. What neighborhoods are you thinking of? Places that are actually independent cities like Grosse Pointe don't count. Palmer Woods, maybe, I guess? Anything else?
Fair question - I did have Grosse Pointe in mind, among others, and that is kind of cheating. Hopefully the NYT is careful enough that they're not comparing Detroit neighborhoods to inner ring suburbs, or the whole thing is sort of bust. I was also thinking about some of the Downtown blocks, but those aren't especially residential.
I don't have a handy answer for a city-limits residential area which was doing all that well, at least not in ~2009 when things were at their worst.
> This is a pretty weird article, without some kind of further support it really smacks of a manufactured narrative.
On the other hand, an article like this can contribute to the hoped-for revival. The media has considerable power. It seems ungenerous to criticise them when they use it for good, manufactured narrative or not.
What? It's absolutely fair to criticize the NYT for manufacturing a narrative regardless of intention. That's just dishonesty. It's not reporting, it's creating a story, regardless of if you think what they're creating is noble or not. If it's not lying to the public, it's pretty damn close.
While you are certainly right, news is meant to be objective. Whether they use it for good or not makes them less useful as if they stop being objective then they will lose their ability to sway opinions for “good.”
There’s also the issue of why would they do this good versus another. Is this the neediest city? What evidence do they use to target their good? Most charities and government have controls in place to focus this. If news goes against their charter to try to improve social good, what mechanism do they have to measure this? The NYTimes is a BCorp. They aren’t a charity with a board.
As always, those of us who live here or nearby (in my case) understand what's happening in Detroit, and are more than happy to watch everyone else in the country dismiss it and look for the negative statistics. Detroit is one of the only cities in the country that seems to attract this mid-brow "are they really improving, though? Yeah, right" dismissal. As someone on the ground, if you want the negative statistics to rally around, start looking at the racial inequality of who the growth is benefiting; that should give you something to talk to your friends about at the coffee pot for a few weeks, at least. (The good news is we've quietly become a champion for diversity in government throughout the metro area and, potentially, the state soon enough.)
Meanwhile, we'll keep working on it. For example, pretty much all of us understand that Detroit needs to decrease in physical size. That's already underway. Statistics don't really account for something like that. The foodie neighborhoods where a SoMa resident would feel at home? Can't really capture those effectively in stats, either. How blocks of what used to be abandoned buildings are now yielding economic crops? On, and on.
You don't snap your fingers and reinvent a city overnight. I left, then left SV to return. Interpret that accordingly.
> more than happy to watch everyone else in the country dismiss it and look for the negative statistics
It's funny - this is exactly the opposite of how I feel about Detroit. I'm enormously skeptical of these turnaround stories, but it's not at all because I want the place to fail.
I grew up in a less-famous part of the rust belt, which like Detroit has been losing population since 1950. I've been hearing about the coming revitalization since I was 10, but without exception the result has been a huge, unrewarding investment to create one new shopping complex or clean up and develop a yuppie-friendly block of apartments and restaurants. It's an approach that gentrified Hell's Kitchen and the Combat Zone, but it's a complete loss without a desirable city encircling the spot under development.
I don't just want Detroit to succeed for it's own sake, although that's obviously a big deal to a lot of people. I want Detroit to be a flagship for Cleveland and Gary and Buffalo and Pittsburgh and all the other places that never seem to make good on their potential. And in the long run, for Japan, Serbia, Ukraine, and so on. This isn't a unique problem, and we need a plan for healthy shrinking of cities and countries.
I want so badly for Detroit to succeed. The downtown revitalizations are admirable, Hantz Woodlands is one of the coolest urban design projects I've seen in years, there's so much being tried. But when I read an article about how Detroit is reviving because housing prices are high, and the real turnaround will come when the population starts growing again? It sounds like my hometown, all willful blindness and attempts to dive straight back into the broken development patterns that got us here in the first place.
> This isn't a unique problem, and we need a plan for healthy shrinking of cities and countries.
I'll add as someone from the rust belt, while we do need to understand how to shrink cities, a lot of this shrinking in the central city was self-inflicted by sprawl.
The metro populations of many of these rust belt cities stalled out in the 1950's-70's but for the most part has been relatively stable since then. Yes, wealthy industry closed or left, but the population was still there.
However short-sighted suburban sprawl, poor planning, and racial segregation hollowed out the central cities while urbanized area doubled or quadrupled the infrastructure a region needed to support. Suburbs boomed with new infrastructure while the city was cannibalized.
Unfortunately there seems to be no political will to stop, even as it consumes the older suburbs now. Subdivisions, new roads, sewers and office parks continue to be thrown up on the edges while a new wave crumbles. The low density of the sprawl can't generate enough revenue to sustain itself - but by the time the bill comes for renewal, the developers have already moved on to a new ring of exurbs.
I wish these cities would look towards regional planning and government like Portland and Toronto.
I’m not skeptical of Detroit’s revival. I’m skeptical of an article that makes the claim Detroit is reviving with pictures and quotes, without citing to facts and statistics.
“if you want the negative statistics to rally around, start looking at the racial inequality of who the growth is benefiting;”
Thanks for the suggestion. How do you measure improvement in racial inequality? Detroit has a really robust open data portal at https://data.detroitmi.gov/browse?category=Government with lots of data on education and health. But I don’t see any with race / ethnicity.
There must be some way to use statistics to capture improvements. There are quite a few statistical models and other cities are able to show quantifiable evidence.
There’s also lots of stats used by businesses to relocate and invest in cities. Certainly it’s not possible to reinvent cities overnight, but Detroit has been in recovery for quite a long while and there must be some metrics that are being targeted.
> Take this at face value: Detroit has 50% more venture-backed startups than it did three years ago. This comes from a study from the Michigan Venture Capital Association (MVCA) which found there are 35 active venture-backed startups in Detroit. Sure, that’s not a huge number compared to other regions, but the growth is notable.
The actual change here is "Detroit had a net gain of 12 startups over three years".
That, and the comparable stat for Michigan as a whole, are the only growth numbers actually present in the article. And even the author rightly admits that we're talking about a tiny starting number. Remember that XKCD about rapid growth and small populations? (https://xkcd.com/1102/) To be a bit cynical, this looks like a submarine piece for the Michigan Venture Capital Association, which is the source for 100% of the article's data, including the filler stuff about investment sectors that adds more statistics without advancing the actual growth thesis.
