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I was at a fairly sizable tech event in Detroit last fall. The convention center and area down by the river were nice enough but people didn't feel very safe in general and there were apparently some incidents--and we're not even talking particularly bad parts of town. A tech company would probably have a lot more luck with something like an Ann Arbor location. I think Detroit proper would be a really tough sell to get most people to move there.

Renaissance Center was started in 1970. That's how long the idea of "Detroit renaissance" has been current. At some point, you have to realize it's never going to happen.

The problem is that Detroit sucks and it’s really cold. I don’t think startups would want to locate there.

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.

Also no useful public transit. The People Mover is a joke and the busses are famous for being hours late / just not showing up. The infra used to be decent when the auto mfgs were around there and out in Southfield where some bigger office buildings were, but they haven’t kept up with the times in terms of connectivity (why would they with no one to use it?). Housing is cheap but who would want to live there? Not much to do, not many cool smart people to hang out with, winters are awful, food scene mostly sucks, music scene is decent if you love really underground stuff and noise / screamo / UG electronic (esp house), schools are awful, nature has tons of mosquitos from all the lakes, lots of lakes if you’re into boating (and lake cabins are like $50k), skiing sucks (no mountains), airport sucks and is far away + Delta took over so if you want non-stop to anywhere expect to pay at least $400, Chicago is a long drive but doable for weekends (again no train which could be an hour on high speed rail, it’s less than 300 miles but flying takes as long as driving due to airports and transport on both ends)…

Yeah, Detroit…nah. Source: grew up there. Never going back.

> "and lake cabins are like $50k"

As a resident of the state below, I've been looking at cabins. Any recommendations?

Pretty much everything north of ~Flint is good if you just want a house by a lake, The UP especially so. Wisconsin and Minnesota have fewer lakes, but they are also good, and have better roads. If you want to go out on the Great Lakes, skiing/snowboarding (on dunes?), hiking, kayaking, hunting, or fishing, narrow down your choices accordingly and take a visit to check it out.

Come to Flint, the water is.... a liquid?

Flint has had clean water for years now.

Hey, you know what sounds fun?

Lets go fishing in East Palistine!

> Minnesota have fewer lakes

Don't say that to any Minnesotans!

And the intellectual property laws are bullshit. Your employer owns all your ideas even if they pop into your head off-hours. It's hard to make a spinoff when some megacorp has that kind of teeth into you.

California has all the startups, not because Californians are smarter or harder-working, but because they are more free.

Do you mean Michigan's IP laws or Detroit? I always assumed that this was something an employer had to write in, not the default.

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...

IANAL so this is my layman's understanding, but I've had to sign a number of agreements with my employer giving them rights to every thought I've ever had.

My understanding is that these agreements are not valid in California. I could be wrong.

Ah, I've seen these clauses too. The link above says for the rights of a patent or similar IP to be assigned there needs to be "consideration" which, they're not paying you when you're at home. So theoretically in MI you could fight something like this if it became a problem.

Doesn't stop them trying to bleed you dry through a lawsuit though.

I could see them arguing that the mere existence of the employment is the consideration....

And with some of the courts that have come about, I could see them winning.... Not justifiably but nevertheless winning....

This is nonsense. In every US state, work you do in your own time on your own equipment that does not compete with your employer is yours.

> California has all the startups, not because Californians are smarter or harder-working, but because they are more free.

Nah. It's the weather /s

> im tired of this fn "posting too fast" -- it stiffles intereaction

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.

Also, generally, if you're having issues with HN, whether other members or the site itself, email the mods: hn@ycombinator.com

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.)

> Also, generally, if you're having issues with HN, whether other members or the site itself, email the mods: hn@ycombinator.com

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.

Yeah, DANG and SAMA and PG all know me.. I am kinda thorn they hate to love...

Ive been here 17 years, and I prick them in the ankles often....

Yes I have inteacted with @dang many times - but I have the utmost respect for the site, I just want to reply faster.

I dont dispairage folks or insult them, you jerk. But just want to be able to reply to comment threads more quickly...

Jerk.

hahah

> Years ago, when detroit was in desparate throws, I thought that it was ripe for a new 'silicon valley' and they should have pushed a huge start-up market. They didnt, but they should have.

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/...

Per the opening of the NYT article, the emptyness at night certainly contributed to feeling unsafe. It's not that there were gangs of shady looking characters out and about for the most part. It's that there were wide, empty streets with no apparent activity.

Yes. That is accurate. I lived in Ann Arbor during 2008 but partied in Detroit from time to time. We'd say that "Detroit is very dangerous...if you run into someone. But you won't, so in reality it's actually safer than anywhere else." It's truly impossible to overstate how empty Detroit was at the time. You could walk around aimlessly for 30-45 minutes in many areas and not see a single soul. That said, you really didn't want to run across strangers -- the reputation for violent crime was well-deserved.

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.

0: https://www.i3detroit.org

About 10 years ago now I took the train out east and had to switch train stations in Buffalo (they have two stations there). I arrived in the suburbs which felt fairly normal to me and I took a bus into downtown. The buildings downtown looked fairly normal to me and in apparently reasonable repair, but the streets were remarkably empty of both cars and people. It kind of freaked me out and that was like 5 in the afternoon. I saw some people here and there and saw a wedding party which helped me feel safe. I never encountered anything directly scary there, but it was disconcerting.

Every city thinks they could be the "next silicon valley" because how hard can it be? Just need some office buildings and internet cables.

I love your comment, but whats interesting is the need for CHEAP housing.

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....

You really think cheap housing is a big factor? You're looking to attract investors, entrepreneurs, and highly skilled engineers. You might stand to be a little cheaper than the bay area, but Detroit cheap isn't necessary surely. You actually want "nice" areas, and you'd want to have rapidly rising property values to encourage people to buy in and stay in the community.

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.

Im not disagreeing with you, but some context to my statement ;;

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.

Pretty much all the real high tech hubs had their seed in some large scale government program.

A city is a large scale government program by definition. Of course a "new silicon valley" needs conducive government infrastructure, laws, support, that is necessary. But not sufficient. You can't just government programme you way to the next silicon valley.