I don't know about Detroit, but Buffalo is in the midst of an amazing if long overdue recovery from its status as a dying old blue collar rust belt town. It wasn't the nerds and hipsters that pulled this off though, it was a few large wealthy real estate developers who saw a town with potential which due to collapsed real estate prices could be developed at a bargain.
Detroit has the advantage of being in the middle of an enormous well-developed network of streets and highways. I see no need to start from scratch when we already have underutilized infrastructure.
I agree with this approach.
Whos gonna pay for 100,000 outlandish salaries? If they all only earned 10 usd an hour....You do the math.
I think you're missing the point. No one dreams of paying developers $10/hr to live in Detroit. The salaries are high legitimately. But the quality of life per $ in SF is questionable. I have a friend who manages 500 engineers and can afford a 3rd story walk up loft next to an elevated freeway.
In San Francisco, your friend likely manages a sweatshop. The engineers on the floor are the high-tech equivalent of the immigrant women working the rows of sewing machines in a Chinatown clothing factory. The manager is the guy who sits in the little room on the side watching the floor to make sure no one takes too long of a pee break. Today's high-tech sweatshops are clean and have toys in them, but the essential economic relations are the same.
Nope. I got the point just fine.
This does actually seem like the cheapest option.
Right now Realtor.com lists the median price per sq. ft in SF as $818, Buffalo is $72, and Detroit is $22. So you could cut your housing cost by 90 percent just by moving to a different city. These folks say they don't want to build a 'liberterian techno-utopia', but it's not clear what else they're offering if they are uninterested in investing in actual cities where people actually live.