Comment by jsmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

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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.

We need something better than that.

> 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.

Urban sprawl in Cleveland - same metro pop in 1948 as in 2002, at least 3 times the land area http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/03/16/sprawl-in-its-purest-f...

Same story with urban sprawl in Buffalo - same metro population, triple the urbanized area http://www.urbanophile.com/2010/04/27/chuck-banas-this-is-sp...

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenbelt_(Golden_Horseshoe)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_growth_boundary

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.

You sure? You literally said, "sounds like far from a revival," and cited population to make your point.

“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 the Resilient Cities initiative - https://www.100resilientcities.org/

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.

But the article mentions none.

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