And I guess my point is that I'm not convinced it's a distortion of the truth at all. Frankly, the photos you see are not merely processed photos sliced and diced to distort the point, they are really a fairly accurate representation of the city. It is not as if you have to go hunting these things out. You sit in Comerica Park and you are looking out at empty skyscrapers. You drive to Comerica park and take even a brief detour from the highway and you are immediately in parts of the city so desolate that you're not even afraid for your safety anymore, like you would be in a bad part of town, because anybody trying to carjack you would have to sprint across a hundred feet of open field. You take a cruise up the river and the contrast between the Canadian side and the American side is stark.
Yeah, there's spots of life, certainly, but those are what you have to go hunting for. Everyone is writing the same story because it's a true story.
I am a big believer in making sure you know the problem before you go looking for the solution, and informing the public can be a slow process. That's where we are right now, learning about the problem. I actually think that trying to paint the city in some sort of false good light would harm the recovery attempts, both by underselling the problems, and wrecking up the recovery narrative that will be a critical problem of getting things back on track.
(If such a thing is even possible, which frankly I'm pessimistic about. Something that you may not know if you don't live around here is that while Detroit is dead, the greater metropolitan Detroit area is alive, and bits of it are even thriving. I think within my lifetime it may no longer be the "greater metropolitan Detroit area" but merely southeast michigan, or perhaps named after one of the formerly-suburbs. Bringing Detroit back to the former glory is very hard because even if for some reason you might consider moving there, there's somewhere else in Southeast Michigan within an hour's drive that is a better choice for you, for almost every purpose. That's Detroit's real problem at this point; the factories aren't coming back, and all the other possible things it could become were crowded out into the suburbs or Ann Arbor, so there's just absolutely nothing left for Detroit. Really, Detroit is already dead, the question now is whether the location is so prime that a new city will plant itself on the same ground.)