The difference lies largely in public transit. NYC had strong transit bones despite a few decades of wayward highway prioritization. Transit enables higher urban densities which (can) carry more revenue per square foot.
NYC has a few great universities which means it has a pipeline of students for high information/innovation business employees. Same with the Bay Area. Chicago, LA too. Detroit doesn’t really have any world class universities.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/could-a...
Also, all the conversations about Detroit vs NYC seem to forget the Riots of 1967.
> The riot resulted in 43 deaths, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 400 buildings destroyed
Entire neighborhoods were razed in the aftermath of that and White-Black relations deteriorated severely leading to an extreme amount of white flight.
If you visit Michigan, suburbs located outside of Wayne County like Dearborn, Ann Arbor, Troy, Hamtrack, and Windsor ON continue to have a vibrant economy, but Detroit (Wayne County) is economically dead.
> The contribution of such deterrence measures (the "stick") offers more explanation for the decline in New York City crime than the improvement in the economy, the authors conclude. Between 1990 and 1999, homicide dropped 73 percent, burglary 66 percent, assault 40 percent, robbery 67 percent, and vehicle hoists 73 percent. The authors' model manages to explain between 33 and 86 percent of those declines