Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

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This is a great article - maybe the best that I've seen in terms of depth and balance about Detroit (I'm from there.)

Both Detroit and Oakland allowed rain and rodents to heavily damage their showcase train stations.

They are trying to restore them now, but a tarp would have saved tens of millions of dollars and years in restoration costs.

The world-class DIA art museum was mentioned. Note that Toledo, Ohio, another ruined city, has the fantastic Libby Glass Museum.

> For some years he has been buying lots in the area

Forward-thinking business owners with cash flow have a unique opportunity to buy downtown real estate.

A trucking company bought hundreds of abandoned homes near swanky Belle Isle(!) and paved an urban parking lot of around 50 acres for trans-shipping between USA and Canada.

Detroit is one of the few cities in the world where you can buy a block-long brick factory and launch a new mfg. business for essentially just the back taxes.

https://www.mobsteel.com/detroit-steel-wheel-co

Friend of a friend owns mobsteel. It's not manufacturing in the sense of "big production lines" ... but more crafting new cars out of old ones. You'll see lots of Adam's cars right at home on the woodward dream cruise.

While the article focuses on the Central, I wish there was a bit of something on the failure that is the people mover.

That being said I wish Ford and Gilbert and everyone trying to revitalize things the best of luck. It's an uphill battle which requires fixing the educational system and essentially the community.

I see this differently. I grew up in Chicago in the era of decline. Economic decline begets social decline. Much is made of the pathology of poor communities, and I've heard it before: for jobs to come, you need to 'fix' the people, the schools, the community. But funny thing, if the jobs are stripped away, the people sink into despair and dysfunction. You see it today, in white working class communities where it seems nearly everyone has succumbed to opiates. When I was growing up it was called the pathology of the Black family. In my area, jobs fled because the companies didn't want to pay union wages. Then gangs took over. The people were blamed for the dysfunction. What happens when the jobs disappear is the real problem.

The problem is people don't want to admit what needs to be done before it's too late.

When the gas crisis hit, it put enough money into the Japanese car makers that their next generation of cars weren't just more fuel efficient than what Detroit was producing, they were actually competitive on multiple levels.

Suddenly the Big Three had to compete, but there was a problem. They had promised their workers wages and benefits they could only provide when they didn't have viable foreign competition. More competition meant lower volumes and lower margins.

There are only two options in that circumstance. Either everyone tightens their belt or the companies fail. But nobody wanted to tighten their belt. The unions wouldn't give back what they negotiated during the time when the American automakers had no competition. So the companies slowly failed, and with them the region.

The alternative might have been that most cars were still made in Detroit, and people there made middle class wages, just not upper middle class wages. But they chose bankruptcy and unemployment over accepting that, and that's what they got.

The promises to workers were certainly a contributing factor, but incompetent and apathetic management was a far larger problem. If management had decided to make efficient, high-quality cars the workers were capable of building them as perhaps only slightly higher cost than the competition. Union assembly line workers didn't design the Ford Pinto.

Management decisions did them no favors, but it was a fundamental shift no matter how well they would have executed. If they had made better cars they would have done better, but there was still no way to maintain their previous revenues when they had new competitors selling good cars for less money, and those revenues were what paid for those benefits.

> people mover

So I used Mayor "Coleman's Train" a few times. The construction went fairly well, but thugs would wait for the doors to close and mug passengers. So passengers started to think twice before boarding. :)

The coolest thing about the People Mover was that it cut thru the corner of some buildings - quite an experience!

Ultimately building the RenCen isolated the original outside downtown from the new "RenCen downtown", destroying the original downtown as a destination.

And of course the RenCen elevators were as dangerous as Coleman's Train. Women couldn't use them alone.

The one good thing I can say about violence in Detroit is that AK-47's were never commonly used, unlike LA. You were more likely to get clubbed than shot.

Interesting Wikipedia link below. So the original projection was for 67,700 riders per day, which is laughable, as the popular Caltrain is slightly less than that even today.

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

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