Comment by wcunning | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wcunning | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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