Varies enormously with the jurisdiction.
There are places in the US so desperate for new residents they will offer you an abandoned house if you fix it up and pay property taxes. Buffalo, NY and Detroit have done this.
There are places in the US so desperate for new residents they will offer you an abandoned house if you fix it up and pay property taxes. Buffalo, NY and Detroit have done this.
I knew a guy that bought an old house in Detroit for a few $K. He also picked up the empty lot next door for like $500 - they'd rather you maintain it (mow the grass) than the city do it, or it look like crap. Not sure if these deals are still a thing today.
They are definitely still a thing, the entity that handles this is the Detroit Land Bank. https://buildingdetroit.org/
I still think detroit is a solid market - but you have to get some serious incentives...
Look at fn twitter - they got SF to give them millions in tax breaks, only to find that all the other services (and tremote work) were untennable on market street (the Emporium now the westfield mall) has turned back into the failed district it was in the 90s (hint; public transport and parking greed fucked that up)
Now look - the city of SF depends on Salesforce and twitter to bring thousands of people into the city - but it has no affordable place to house or park them.
I think twitter owes the city a giant amount of money - and benioff can go fuck himself (speaking as someone who built out many of his offices)
The point being that places such as Detroit need to up there game and build a tech scene - but I am afraid its too late.
-
EDIT: @DANG - im tired of this fn "posting too fast" -- it stiffles intereaction.
I dont participate in Reddit any longer, but seriously - ive talked to you about this many times....
I want to engage with HNers, and your speed-brake thwarts that... knock it off. :-)
Also, they are poorly managed and that’s part of their decline. They aren’t trying any good ideas like encouraging startup incubators and whatnot.
Yeah, Detroit…nah. Source: grew up there. Never going back.
As a resident of the state below, I've been looking at cabins. Any recommendations?
Lets go fishing in East Palistine!
Don't say that to any Minnesotans!
California has all the startups, not because Californians are smarter or harder-working, but because they are more free.
Do you have a source? From looking, the only default I found is Michigan has the concept of a "shop right" but that involves inventions on employer time with employer resources. It is also narrowly defined[1]
[1]: See end of "Patent Rights" section, https://www.michbar.org/file/barjournal/article/documents/pd...
My understanding is that these agreements are not valid in California. I could be wrong.
Doesn't stop them trying to bleed you dry through a lawsuit though.
And with some of the courts that have come about, I could see them winning.... Not justifiably but nevertheless winning....
Nah. It's the weather /s
The #1 land-owner in downtown Detroit[0] (founder of Rock Financial and owner of Rocket Mortgage, Quicken Loans, and Cleveland Cavaliers) thought the same thing at the time and worked hard to make it happen[1, 1b]. It never "blew up" but the efforts did bring in some substantial amount of revitalization and additional business which perseveres through today. He also spearheaded attempts to win Amazon's bid for "HQ2" to bring amazon's new major headquarters to Detroit.[2]
Dan Gilbert went to public high school outside of Detroit, and studied at relatively low-cost state schools (Michigan State University, Wayne State University). His son recently passed at 26 from neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes tumors, that can affect the brain, spinal cord and various nerve signals.[3] His dad ran a small lounge / restaurant in Detroit which looked like this[4], and his mom was a realtor[5]. His grandfather, Manuel Feldstein, owned car washes in Detroit[5].
And no, I'm not part of a PR effort for the family, I just like looking into where various modern-day rich people came from. Detroit had a huge role in prohibition smuggling from Canada with plenty of people rising up the economic strata a la "Great Gatsby". It's claimed that 75% of the alcohol smuggled into the USA during prohibition came into Detroit. The backdrop for the culture of "Detroit muscle cars" were speed-running alcohol cargoes across the frozen Detroit river from Canada to USA. Smugglers even built a "beer pipeline" running from a brewery in Canada to the basement of an establishment in Detroit. The mafia were heavily involved in these profits. While it's possible that the car wash and restaurants were money-laundering fronts for such endeavors, the family's choice of neighborhoods and schooling are consistent with that of their public persona. Yes, they received plenty of benefit from being white during a time of great segregation, and benefitted from connections across the Jewish community which led to his founding of Rock Financial with Ron Berman. But it doesn't appear that he was born with any particularly different advantages than my father's Catholic family or many other (white) families in that area. My grandfather went from penniless after serving in WW2 to standard middle class as middle management at Ford Motor Company and my father came home from school one to a smoldering pile of ashes on the front lawn from a cross that was burnt in opposition to my grandparents vocal support for allowing black people to buy houses in Plymouth, MI around the time of the Detroit race riots.
0: https://www.michiganradio.org/economy/2013-06-20/gilbert-own...
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/business/dan-gilberts-que...
1b: Alternate: https://archive.ph/abzX7
2: https://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20170914/news/135516...
3: https://www.cleveland.com/cavs/2023/05/cavs-owner-dan-gilber...
4: https://www.ebay.com/itm/295323506705
5: https://digital.bentley.umich.edu/djnews/djn.2010.08.19.001/...
A friend of mine rented a room for $250/month in an enormous mansion with 25-foot wide marble staircases and a panic room/vault in the basement. I have no idea how many rooms the mansion had, it was far too big to fully explore in the time I had. Since no one else was renting a room there, my friend used the mansion to throw raves with 50-100 people and we mostly stuck to 2-3 rooms, with the majority of the house still being empty.
Some of my friends from slightly wealthier families bought up entire neighborhoods in Detroit at $10,000/home and renovated them, they revitalized the neighborhoods by installing a fun neighborhood dive bar with cheap menus and some convenient commercial stores. Many of those neighborhoods are still "hot spots" today, retaining quirky/fun culture. Makerspaces bloomed as well[0] due to a truly insane amount of heavy industrial equipment which was being sold for fractions of a penny on the dollar. The aforementioned rave scene also laid a lot of the musical foundations for today's EDM music, though it was not as impactful as the Baby Boomer generation's "Motown Records" (The Supremes, Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, the Marvelettes, and the Miracles). Before the Detroit Race Riots, people were regularly moving from Chicago to Detroit because Detroit was far and away the "cooler" city to live in of the two.
AND internet cables, and cafes, and etc...
But it is easier and cheaper to build this in detroit as infra should be cheaper;
grab a quote from a micro-trenching vendor in detroit with their planning dept and tell me how much cheaper it is v california....
Silicon valley isn't silicon valley because it had cheap property or cafes or internet cables -- lots of places had cheap housing, and the internet didn't exist when SV was kicking off. The reasons are (among other things) that it is close to some of the best technology universities in the world, had significant defense and government technology opportunities and investment over a hundred years or so. You can't just spend a few billion and pop up a new one of those somewhere.
And I'm speculating here, but the hip vibe of California and San Francisco in the 60s and 70s, and the relatively large proportion of Asian immigrants at the time quite possibly helped to draw in young, creative, talented people. Also something that's difficult to conjure up out of nowhere. It's actually a confluence of things that won't be possible to reproduce again because hundreds of cities are trying to do it so there will be no such singular center of gravity.
My grand parent bought their house in Saratoga, California in 1959 for 24,000.
They sold it in ~1999 for ~2.5 million
The area was all apple apricot and orange orchards.
Gramps wasa nuclear engineer building bombs for General Elecrtic (one of the designers of Hanford -- manahattan shit)
Silicon valley was built - literally upon the design of the IC - out of the founders of Intel from Fairchild (sunnyvale) (When I work at intl, andy grove and I had the same pee schedule (my cube was right next to his, and for some reason the only place we intereacted was the restroom, when we peed)
Anyway - I have seen silicon valley evolve from orchards to chips... I've been here the whole time. Detroit can do it too.
My guess is that people are downvoting you (maybe because of profanity? not sure) which results in a shadowban/ratelimit of your account. Your comment shows up as gray to me, which I think means it's been downvoted or flagged.
They can fix things, or explain rationales. They've been overwhelmingly gracious, clear, and when necessary, firm in my own discussions.
(Most of my communications are brief items readily fixed or not. Occasionally a longer bit, and even those at least generate a response.)
That's what he did? From gp's post:
> EDIT: @DANG - im tired of this fn "posting too fast" -- it stiffles intereaction.
> I dont participate in Reddit any longer, but seriously - ive talked to you about this many times....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36382738
The whole random time-based temporary bans cloaked as "posting too fast" is pretty screwed up. It's unclear what the restrictions are (as dang himself has told me) and you don't get the warning until _after_ you try to post once you've past the limit.
But yes I do agree with you that dang is kind of unusually responsive when you question him on his decisions. That, however, doesn't mean you'll find his reasoning all that compelling. Regardless, he runs the forum so he gets to censor it as he wishes.
Ive been here 17 years, and I prick them in the ankles often....
I dont dispairage folks or insult them, you jerk. But just want to be able to reply to comment threads more quickly...
Jerk.
hahah