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Comment by dizzystar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

>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.

Maybe by pointing to blue collar work that still pays well. A buddy of mine is an auto mechanic and is the sole income earner for his family. They do just fine in St Louis (another city like Detroit and Pitt). Another friend of mine is a pipe fitter for gas pipelines who works 3-6 months a year and earns ~150-200K depending on contracts. Spends the rest of the year surfing and diving.

Trades do, in fact, make money. Pay attention to how much you spend next time you call a plumber.

> Pay attention to how much you spend next time you call a plumber.

Anecdotal, but the average quote I got for electricians in the bay area was $200/hour. This is also consistent for electricians in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago (just had a friend recently get work done at that price). I recently paid $2k to get a transmission done, of which $1700 was labor alone (took 3 days).

Point is - these trades are no joke when it comes to earning income, especially if you're talented.

I'm a serious proponent of promoting vocational jobs. Even in an "AI world" you're still going to need mechanics. Basically anything with moving parts needs labor.

The $1700 labor cost isn't really labor, it also includes overhead like rent, utilities, general supplies, insurance, etc. Some of those costs are also covered by the markup in parts, but not when parts only cost $300.

If it took a full 3 days that's 24 hours of work, or around $70/hour, probably half of that went to the employee which gives him around $70K/year salary, not much in the bay area.

> If it took a full 3 days that's 24 hours of work

I should have clarified. It took 3 days end to end. It's unlikely the actual labor was 24 hours (the tech even admitted that once they take the transmission apart they have to let it soak in lubricant).

> rent, utilities, general supplies, insurance, etc.

Of course. But as you can probably imagine, most auto shops skimp on those costs as much as possible. The point is, a developer charging $200/hr (even remote) for their time is also paying for insurance, workspace, computer, internet connection, etc.

How much of the high labour costs actually goes to the owner of the shop not the guy/gal doing the work.

Where did that $2k come from? While it's nice there is some way to redistribute wealth in this way, unfortunately service sector jobs don't create wealth: you can not have a city solely of repairmen and realtors.

Less skilled factory work would generate wealth, but unfortunately those are the exact jobs that left.

If you have a $35,0000 truck with a blown transmission, then your repair-person just created $35,000 - $2,000 - whatever_that_truck_would_have_worth_as_scrap_parts.

Electricians, Plumbers, Roofers, Drywallers, auto-motive repair to some degree, are the one who actually create/repair/restore the only physical infrastructure that actually matters. My Twitter, Facebook, Instagram could all disappear, and it would probably have no (real) impact on me. But take away electricity, water, roof, walls, transportation - I'll notice within a few minutes.

In my mind, those are the people who create real wealth.

I think what the parent poster meant was if the whole town is filled with service providers, their customers must also be from the same local area. But if there are no other jobs for those customers to work at (to bring outside money into the community), they won't be able to afford those services. Local trade with each other (mechanic selling services to an electrician, the electrician doing work for a roofer, and the roofer putting a new roof on the the mechanic's workshop) falls apart when you don't have money flowing into the area from outside (i.e., building trucks to sell to people in other cities).

Edit: After seeing the downvotes on the parent post, and a couple similar ones, I think people are reading "creating wealth" vs. "not creating wealth" as value judgements on the people in those industries. Whereas in this context I think they mean in the purely economic / accounting sense, similar to "cost centers" and "profit centers" in businesses. Without profit centers, the business would crumble, but without the value that the cost centers bring to the business, the profit centers wouldn't be able to function.

So just like Silicon Valley needs to find a way to not price service workers (janitors, mechanics, etc) out of the area, other places need the same healthy balance of money flowing into the area along with a local economy to distribute that money around.

>service sector jobs don't create wealth: you can not have a city solely of repairmen and realtors.

Repairmen very directly create wealth by adding value to the thing they repair, equivalent to a craft trade or construction. Realtors create wealth indirectly by increasing/facilitating trade, trade creates wealth.

What is "wealth"?

If car built in a factory is useful for 10 years without repairs, but useful for 30 years with repairs, the mechanics add 20 years of useful life to the car. Does that not increase wealth?

I'd argue it increases utility, not wealth. It'd increase wealth if that vehicle was used in a business to generate income.

While you are entitled to your definition, I thought I'd throw in one of the original PG definitions:

> Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth.[0]

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

This is why I'm a big advocate (but not affiliate) of the "mikeroweWORKS" foundation. Mike Rowe, from the TV show "Dirty Jobs", is using his foundation to revive interest in trade schools and jobs. There are a lot of people who could be great machinists, electricians, plumbers, etc., but due to social pressures, they start college and soon drop out, then work for peanuts (if they can find any job at all). We need to eliminate the stigma against trade schools and encourage people to work with their hands if that's their passion.

http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/

I'm a big fan of his foundation too, but I often find myself wondering whether the stigma is the biggest problem. I looked into becoming an electrician awhile back, and the path to licensure seemed long and expensive. Contra that path, I'm sure we all know very successful self-educated programmers. Maybe the licensure and training expense is totally necessary, or maybe it could be improved through regulation reforms or apprenticeship instead of for-pay training. I really don't know enough about these industries to say, but it seems possible. It also seems like that would be likely to result in those jobs no longer paying such top dollar. Put a different way: it seems like if Mike Rowe were extremely successful in his initiatives on this front, the result may be that the jobs he is advocating are no longer as attractive as they currently are.

Having said all that, I'll be very angry with myself if my future children graduate high school thinking that college is the only next step that would make their loved ones proud, like it was for me and my friends.

> Pay attention to how much you spend next time you call a plumber.

How many tradesmen are self-employed? I think business-owning plumbers would be equivalent to consultants in the software world, and their billed income (per hour) is way above average for the field.

I totally agree. My parents own a 'cabin' in a development in the mountains, and the biggest cabin in the development -by far- is owned by a a plumber. He has done very well, and I doubt he writes much, if any, code.

You’d be surprised! My dad is a builder, and programs his own utility software (in Access and other systems) to make his life easier (like work diaries, log books and so on)

Well put! I shouldn't assume.

Yup, I had a leaking roof during the last rainstorm and the emergency repair cost me $800 for 1 hour of work. Still happy with it because the potential damage would have been much worse.

A while back I needed some sprinkler work done.. normally I would have attempted it myself but due to health issues I can't do it anymore... and the lowest cost gardener was $200 for 30 minutes worth of work. There is still money in the blue collar trades for someone willing to run a business.

Just for perspective, these jobs are a bit different than regular contracting or hourly jobs. Although the hourly rate seems high, often we exclude the travel time. Also the uneven demand. For example- On a rainy day, there might be 10 calls but they can only take a few and on sunny days they'd be lucky to get a call.

Here's what the BLS has to say about that. https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

I think about this when people post about how you don;t really need a college degree, you just need a trade. I have no doubt that some tradesmen do very well but I doubt they represent the entire class of workers.

I do wonder what the numbers would look like if trained tradesmen (and women) were compared based on time spent learning (e.g. years of apprenticeship vs. years of college.)

When the factory closes, whose car do you repair? When the factory closes, whose plumbing do you fix? When the factory closes, whose house to you build?

As all of these cities aptly demonstrate, plumbing and auto mechanic jobs aren't a panacea for disappearing factory jobs.

Sadly, this is the sort of advice that would work for anybody, but won't work for everybody. :(

Specifically, if more folks were trying to follow this advice, it would begin to fail in predictable ways.

I think the "everyone can be a millionaire via college" mentality has created a focus on higher education (engineering, medical school, law school etc.) ... and dissuaded people from professions which may be very worthwhile (welder, autoshop-owner) ... but will cap out at wages of $200k-$300k.

We've made these jobs seem "dirty" and low class when they're not.

It's less about the cap and more about the wage curve. Some industries are extremely punishing. As a musician you either make nothing or millions. As an architect you get paid poverty wages or you're internationally famous and can name your price.

If you're a welder you'll get a very good starting wage, and while it will never hit stratospheric levels, the upper end when you you've had years of experience and have worked to increase your qualifications can be extraordinarily generous.

I know two highly qualified welders that work on oil plant equipment and they make so much money they can afford to take half the year off to do whatever they want. You don't want random idiots welding pipes in a billion dollar plant, and you need to pay for that kind of talent.

Consider: Tech workers often get paid very well, but I don't know of many that get overtime.

But the % of former blue collar workers who have the interest and can go though the academic requirements is small (and most of that cohort today go to Uni).

For example the requirements to go on my technician course in the UK back in the day required 6 O levels (exams taken at 16) for the Bank only 4. Ok it was a specialized for the local industry themo fluids one.

The irony is that a lot (I would even say, most) of what's being done in the software engineering field is really more of a trade, and would likely benefit from being treated accordingly - including having trade schools rather than colleges teaching that stuff. I'm sure there are other industries like that.

When enough people realize just how much of it is smoke and mirrors, I think the common snobbery towards those "dirty" jobs would dissipate. Right now, it's self-reinforcing, because being "better than those guys" is part of white collar identity, regardless of pay. It reminds me of the racial arrangement in Jim Crow South, where even the most poor whites would find solace in that they're not on the lowest rung of the social ladder.

Why would it benefit software engineering or the workers? it would benefit employers as they could reduce salary costs and working conditions.

Also this would require employers to commit to training in away they will not want to do and because of the one size fits all they would have to pay for a generic learn the needed skills and knowledge.

The various bootcamps and accelerator programs may end up, in the end, morphing into a form of "trade school" for software engineers.

Agreed. Most people you know will never make 300k a year. The vast majority are unlikely to make 200k. And in most of the country anything over 100k is seen as doing well and rising. Building something based on a trade and "only" making 200k is laughing all the way to the bank in most cases.

Trades pay very well with just a high school education.

> "Nowadays, "working-class, blue-collar" stuff does not make money`" is just flat out wrong. That line of thinking is a major contributing factor to the shortage of labor in blue collar fields, along with mass amounts of young adults with crippling college debt.

Trades pay well with a customer base to support them.

The core problem is, ultimately, the customer base is led by the white collar jobs who lack the skills to perform those tasks.

The blue collar tradesmen, frankly, has the skills to avoid buying services from each other. I know a mechanic that does her own plumbing, electrical, etc. She'd never try to make money at it but to the best of my knowledge the only time she hired anyone was to get the HVAC installed. That was largely a size/experience issue with a crane to move it into her backyard over the fence.

People will always own houses. People will always be too lazy to learn how to do things themselves. But thats besides the point, the real money in trades is commercial work, not residential.

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.

> 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.

A critical aspect of that is the distribution of engineering skill is bimodal, if not multi modal.

People want a lot of top end coders. The lower and middle, far less so.

Lumping all comp sci labor into one skill and ability bracket prevents nuanced understanding.

I also wonder if, in some ways, devops (I mean the "idea", not the engineers themselves) could be commoditizing IT people (not implying there's some conspiracy), blurring the distinction between devs and sysadmins in particular.

Well you could say the same about the entirety of "the cloud" ... no need to pay a team of sysadmins to manage, deploy, and maintain a data center, when you can easily provision a VM in seconds, or even better, use a SaaS offering so you don't even have to worry about applying patches and stuff ;)

I'm old enough to remember when a significant part of the "dream of the Internet" was that knowledge workers could work anywhere with an ISP.

Obviously that dream was not widely realized, but there are some employers that will allow you to write code from the countryside.

Remote working is becoming more and more accepted as time goes on, and collaboration technologies improve. Video chat is by far one of the most useful things about being on a remote team, in addition to things like git/pull request workflows making it simple and async-by-default to work with others.

I've got news for you. Unless you own the business, your work of any kind is a cost to be repressed.

>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.

> 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-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.

Ohio is particularly useful as a source of flammable water…

"Come see our river which catches on fire. It's so polluted that all our fish have AIDS."

For those unfamiliar, the Cuyahoga river which flows through Ohio was so polluted at various points that it caught on fire 10+ times. The fires were one of the catalysts for the environmental movement.

This is exactly why Nestle set up shop in Michigan. They can afford to maintain their own infrastructure to pump and bottle the cheap, abundant water and the government could give a damn about the marginalized, majority black and latino population that remains in the area.

Big corporate players are noticing the trend and playing the long game. There's a reason why Michigan and Wisconsin have crippled collective bargaining and imposed restrictive voter-ID measures.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/29/nestle-pays-...

> There's a reason why Michigan and Wisconsin have crippled collective bargaining and imposed restrictive voter-ID measures.

This is, in all practical matters, incorrect for Michigan. See the following, directly from the relevant authority's website:

"Michigan does have a voter identification requirement at the polls. Voters are asked to present an acceptable photo ID such as a Michigan driver's license or identification card. Please note that voters who do not have an acceptable form of ID or failed to bring it with them to the polls still can vote. They simply sign a brief affidavit stating that they're not in possession of a photo ID. Their ballots are included with all others and counted on Election Day."

https://www.michigan.gov/sos/0,4670,7-127-29836-202520--F,00...

I lived in the state for years and met many people who never showed acceptable ID to vote.

Nestle set up shop 185 miles from Detroit because there is a nice aquifer there and the permit was cheap. Detroit actually has a good water supply and good treatment (their distribution system is aging).

I'd be fine with Nestle paying a whole lot more for the permit (because bottled water is dumb), but the value of the water they are extracting isn't even that high, so if you made them pay high prices and used all the money improving municipal water systems, it wouldn't make much difference.

> the industries that made these cities what they are are mostly gone now These cities often have attractive qualities for other industries, and with enough foresight these cities can position themselves well to succeed in the future. Many have been; e.g. Pittsburgh shed its steel roots and now is home of a leading health care industry, and a burgeoning tech one.

You mean that some (or perhaps, "a few") have been. I'd say that Pittsburgh is more the exception than the rule. Also, Pittsburgh is probably a little unique: they have multiple universities there, including UPittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, and Duquesne, so they were in a good position to move on to other industries. Also, I'm thinking the weather there is a good bit better than in Detroit or Flint or Buffalo or Toledo, which get lake-effect weather giving them very cold winters.

I'm guessing that if you want to predict a city's ability to transform to a haven for new industries (like tech), you need to look at how much of a college town it is. Carnegie Mellon is a top-ranked private university with 13,500 students (so not a tiny place), and just one of many large universities there. They also have a lot of nice cultural stuff there, largely thanks to Mr. Carnegie, such as the museums. Most other rust-belt cities can't boast these features. Cleveland has CWRU (11,300 students), but I can't think of a whole lot of academia in cities like Detroit, Buffalo, and definitely not Toledo or Flint.

Both Detroit and Buffalo both have large public research universities along with many smaller public and private institutions.

Detroit has the University of Michigan with 44,700 students nearby (about the same distance as my unfortunately long commute). Buffalo has the University of Buffalo with 30,600 students. Both universities are among the largest employers in their metro areas.

Both metros have tried to diversify their economies, as have Pittsburgh and Cleveland. The health care industry is a large source of jobs for all of them.

> 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).

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.)

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.

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 (Detroit)

http://zaidan-x.org:8192/csa/488 (SF)

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

People are moving from Ann Arbor to Detroit, really?

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/

UofM EECS '08 graduate working for Plex Systems in Troy, MI. Plex (plex.com) makes ERP software, like SAP/Oracle. We're focused on the manufacturing portion, while SAP/Oracle focus on financials.

I grew up in Troy, MI - '04 Troy High. I now live in downtown Detroit, right off of Grand Circus Park.

Plex generates $115 million in ARR. Plex and Duo Security are the largest 'pure SaaS' software outfits in Michigan that I'm aware of.

If you're interested in working for Plex, shoot me your paperwork/Github username - akarpowitsch at plex dot com

I'm not in need of a job at the moment but I just wanted to say that Plex was a primary sponsor for my high school FIRST robotics team! Indirectly your company influenced my life in a big way, so thank you :)

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.

Correct. They are largely overpriced though.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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/

There are also two smaller colleges, Marygrove and University of Detroit Mercy.

Ann Arbor, not incidentally, appears to be doing really well relative to comparable cities and towns in the Midwest.

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.

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.)

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

Ann Arbor would be an outlying suburb of Detroit if UM wasn't here.

While I believe a few of the Ford family live in the A2 area still, that's only because Dearborn is already west of Detroit's center, thereby shortening their trip to Ford's HQ. But even without rush hour traffic, A2 is more than an hour's drive from Woodward Ave, inevitably straight down I-94.

I suspect not even the heirs and heiresses of Detroit's tycoons are willing to shuttle daily from A2 into Detroit proper.

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

> "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).

> 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.

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.

> 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.

The statement you are quoting had nothing to do with marriage equality. I think maybe you are trying to ascribe attributes to whoever wrote that statement that do not exist. The person wrote "man or woman" in place of "person."

Perhaps it's me that misunderstood, but I took that 'nothing shameful' to be more about the 'calloused hands' portion of the sentence. It was meant, I think, to be a poetic way of referring to people who perform manual labor.

I think that interpretation is absolutely correct, because the quote in question is "There is nothing shameful about marrying a man or woman..." which says nothing about the gender of the person marrying that man or woman. It goes on to say "...while holding each other's calloused hands at the alter", which, in the context, is easily assumed to be a man and a woman, but which isn't actually, as it's referring to the hypothetical person and the man or woman they are marrying.

>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.

> screaming until at the TV until they are horse

just say neigh to screaming at sports events until you are hoarse.

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

"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'.

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.

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.

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].

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.

> 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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