There is little to no way Amazon is going to be able to import their workforce to live in the city of Detroit. A whole lot of the housing options there are extremely outdated or require extreme renovation, the city’s infrastructure is in crumbles, and blight is still a problem.
Source: I have some friends that live in Detroit. Like, the actual city, not the Detroit Metro area.
The only thing that would hold us back is infrastructure. We have virtually no public transportation, and the influx of all the Amazonians would take traffic to hellish levels. But to me, I see that as a positive. We need a wakeup call to finally overhaul our public transport.
Source: I live in Detroit.
Room to grow housing and office space requires a whole lot of development to happen. My greater point is that there is very little incentive for most people to move to Detroit compared to other locales that are further along on actually having a lot of the type of housing that is popular on the west coast, some semblance of working public transport and infrastructure, etc. The M-1 Rail is a good start, but I think we are still years from Detroit being a truly viable choice.
There are better options than Detroit for this largely just because Detroit is very far behind other cities that can offer some of these needs now and grow into the future ones. Detroit is still at the stage of needing to grow a bit more to support the influx.
The M-1 rail is a joke. It goes from New Center to downtown, which is like a 4 mile stretch. It's the People Mover 2.0, public transportation lip service. It doesn't connect the burbs to the city, which is what we need. Not a personal shuttle for Quicken Loans employees living in midtown.
Our problem is that the northern suburbs get to vote on public transportation and they always vote against it. People who live in the burbs closer to Detroit (Ferndale, Royal Oak, Oak Park, Hazel Park, Roseville, etc) want to be able to ride something into the city so they don't have to deal with traffic and parking.
I can't say I care very much one way or another wether Amazon comes here, I just disagree with the sentiment that Detroit is unworthy of it.
Seems ridiculous to me, when a train approaches an intersection, you should have bollards come up and the train should always take priority. Moving hundreds of people is a higher priority than moving a few dozen, but yet the train is the lowest priority in LA intersections, and grey crossings aren't properly defended against idiot drivers crashing into trains.
Further, to my understanding of Detroit's current situation, the city/local government could grant Amazon entire zip code blocks of commercial/industrial real estate for its purposes. Repurposing and renovating/rebuilding already existing structures will always be cheaper than going from the ground up.
As one senator once said. “I don’t need you when it’s easy if I don’t have you when it’s hard”.