Move Detroit
movedetroit.com
movedetroit.com
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_plate#Plate_mot...
When I was a kid, Detroit was a symbol of US industry and engineering. All those huge muscle cars. That kind of Mad Max Road Warrior attitude (yeah, I know that's Aussie, but that same attitude).
Now it's a symbol of US decline, I think. It's strange to me that the USA let this happen, or that it didn't have the power to stop it happening.
It would be like the UK allowing Oxford or Cambridge to become a slum, the universities moving away and the old buildings becoming derelict. Or the Sydney Opera House going vacant and letting squatters move in.
There's something very, very symbolic about Detroit, then and now.
Just my opinion. Apologies if it offends, that is not my intent.
I think there is an untold story here about the part that the automobile played in the fall of Detroit. Detroit probably experienced more sprawl than other cities due to the influence of automobiles on the local economy. You only need to drive around Bloomfield Hills for 10 min to know that the metro has plenty of money, but the people who could afford 2 cars weren't staying in the city proper.
On the flip side it was a terribly exciting place to live at that time. Detroit still had excellent music, sports, and entertainment. Unlike the major metros on the coasts, I never knew anyone who had a problem making rent or had to work extra jobs to get by. A double edged sword I suppose.
> When I was a kid, Detroit was a symbol of US industry and engineering. All those huge muscle cars.
Which was precisely the problem at the time. Detroit was producing muscle cars (with terrible engineering other than gigantic engines) and huge land yachts "Because profit!" when gas was going nuts and got demolished when Japanese cars showed up. Sound familiar? Detroit is producing Brodozers "Because profit!" when gas is going nuts and is going to get demolished when BYD finally shows up.
> Now it's a symbol of US decline, I think. It's strange to me that the USA let this happen, or that it didn't have the power to stop it happening.
I can't think of any country that managed the transition away from a manufacturing labor dominated economy. All of them wound up with their large employment manufacturing centers completely hollowed out and left to rot.
The echoes of this neglect reflect into the anger of the electorate we see today.
However, these same people also refuse to embrace working in new fields like renewable energy. They have completely forgotten that even in the 1970s when the auto companies were extremely sclerotic their employees still had to retrain constantly (that was one of the duties of the unions).
Glasgow went from a prosperous shipbuilding town to the heroin capital of Europe. Sheffield also collapsed fairly dramatically with the loss of the steel industry, though maybe it didn't quite fall so far.
Nah, Sheffield is supported by their main export — Doctor Who’s companions. :D
My anecdotal evidence is backed up by Detroit Metro real estate outpacing the national average significantly over the past 10 years. The people and culture are great too.
Also if America is ever going to greatly increase manufacturing, Detroit (and the rust belt overall) will be a big player because the navigable waterways have not moved and it is still 10 times cheaper to move things by water than land.
Agreed. My family's from Detroit. Like so many others, they left in the mid-70s because Detroit had become unfathomably bad - the job market was shit, crime and corruption was out of control, and there was no hope for things turning around. In the mid-80s, there were countless jokes about Detroit, like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iFxyAA0l0nU
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
It has lost ground in some industries, it has also invested and pioneered in high tech design and manufacturing, aerospace, computers, software, internet, etc. which has kept it strong. And I know GDP doesn't give you much picture, but it gives you something.
Australia is doing well too as a coal/LNG depot and iron ore mine for China, after giving up their manufacturing industry and any pretense at technology. The "Education" export sector has looked good on paper, but the penny is beginning to drop that universities have been allowed to be hollowed out and turned into degree mills chasing short-term profit like some wall street quarterly results whore, and when there is very little investment in science and technology in the country, "higher education" can never be at the forefront. I guess that's good, the world will "always" need iron ore, bauxite, uranium, and coal/gas (until it doesn't). But when it runs out or stops being bought, are we going to be any better off than the Saudi post-oil?
Australia has so little of its own capability that if something serious happened to our maritime trade (I'm not talking about the tiny blip in the Persian Gulf just now, but a serious conflict involving real players), they would all starve to death in the dark, surrounded by vast fields of food and energy.
America has its problems, but it always has something on the go there. There's an energy in the air over there. Like China. People are determined to do something, reminds me of stories of the Australia that died before I was born. Australians aspire to work in a mine or in a worthless government bureaucrat jobs they can't get fired from, and accumulate rental properties. "But it's so 'laid back'", "but we don't have gun crime", "we have government healthcare" does not mean the road it is going down is not a dead end.
What does this mean? That Australia is self-sufficient in food and energy but exports all of it or does it mean Australia is incapable of processing the raw materials into finished goods?
It's similar with food: our Wheatbelt produces vast amounts of wheat. Which is great but kinda useless without global trade; we can't turn all that wheat into actual food ourselves.
Australia ships thermal and coking coal and iron ore and bauxite and uranium and lithium to China, Japan, Korea, and buys cars and steel and batteries and machinery back from them. It's not high-tech, smart, forward looking. It extremely extremely lucky (cursed by its luck, really) to have the natural non-renewable resources that it does, and it is hell-bent on squandering them all as fast as possible and having nothing to show for it by the end of it.
> But when it runs out or stops being bought, are we going to be any better off than the Saudi post-oil?
"It" is not going to run out in the foreseeable future. Australia is unimaginably huge and has deposits of pretty much everything somewhere. The state of Western Australia alone has 29% of the world's known iron ore, more than any other entire country (Brazil is #2 with 19%) and more than Russia and China combined.
Or the Roman Forum going from the centre of life in the world's most powerful empire to cattle field? [0]
There's so much history and culture to explore; along with tons of huge parks.
If I had to leave Tokyo, would definitely be up there.
I don't think this is actually true - either that it happened quickly, or that how quickly it happened was a surprise. Detroit (the city, which was always the "problem") depopulated from the 1950s onwards as the major industry moved to the suburbs, and the effects were obvious even in the 1960s. It took another 40-50 years to hit the bottom though.
That said, the population is now growing again (since 2021).
There are some areas up in the UP that are bad, but very few people live there and they know what they’re signing up for.
Meanwhile, the people I know who live in NJ got wrecked by snow repeatedly this year, multiple feet at a time. I don’t recall ever getting anything like that around Detroit.
Of course, I was in apartments with covered parking and snow removal services the whole time, so I didn’t need to care too much.
I do remember the guys in the Chicago office talking about when they got a foot or so of snow and had to walk to the nearby hotel to spend the night, because it wasn’t safe to drive home. I heard stories like that from people in the Michigan office too, but in my 20 years working I still never ran into it. Just lucky I guess.
It's better than $0, which is what most places pay you to move there.
I love Detroit. A city overflowing with history and character. The thing that struck me the most about Detroit was the pride. The people who live there love their city in a way I have not seen elsewhere. I encourage everyone to visit. It was nothing like what I expected.
My roots are firmly planted in Seattle now but just a few years ago I was seriously considering a move. If I ever left here Detroit is high on my list.
But really its the city tax. I wonder if you can Delaware your LLC or something to avoid it.
Now it is closer to 46.6% of adults working. That's the best of times for the Detroit area.
They'd need to add at least 2 zeroes to the end of that number to have any impact.
Michigan has some of the best universities in the country, dunno what you’re talking about. University of Michigan is 45 minutes away and it’s ranked #23 in the world according to https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
And that's one world class university in the entire region. Compare that to Boston, SF, LA, DC, Chicago, Pittsburgh and others.
The Detroit metropolitan area includes Ann Arbor, it’s in the same commute range. Yes if your main goal is to attend a university, you should live closer than the nearby metropolis, regardless of which university you choose. It doesn’t mean Detroit has “limited higher education access”.
And there’s plenty of other quality universities nearby. Michigan has a lot of faults but lack of quality universities isn’t one of them. Unless your standards are “it’s not Stanford or Harvard”, in which case you’re just being unreasonable.
LA has USC, CalTech, and UCLA within a closer distance than UM, and SF has Cal nearby and Stanford further out. If you want to count UM for Detroit, you have to count all of those schools for their respective cities.
Detroit is not as strong as any of these cities or metro areas with regard to higher education. You can get as defensive and incredulous as you want, but no reasonable person is going to argue otherwise. The fact that UM is 45 miles away isn't going to make a lot of people choose to live in Detroit proper.
That wasn’t your first claim, you’ve moved the goalposts. You claimed Detroit has “limited access to higher education”. I never meant to imply Detroit is as good as Boston or SF or the other cities you mentioned, only to point out how ridiculous it is to claim that Detroit doesn’t have some very high quality universities nearby. I didn’t get into Wayne State, MSU, Michigan Tech, Lawrence Tech, UofM Dearborn, or Kettering either, but there are plenty of mid-to-high tier universities close by. “Limited access to higher education” is a flatly ridiculous claim.
You're the one trying to poke random holes in my claim in what appears to be an attempt to defend Detroit (there are none, because it's based in the objective fact that Detroit has less to offer than many, if not most, other large cities in that area by any metric), and now are saying I'm moving the goalposts when I address your generally inaccurate statements.
To be clear, both the city of Detroit and its metro area offer less access to quality higher education than many other major cities in the US. It is limited in that regard, especially since this program isn't trying to entice people to move to the general metro area. It wants people to move to the city.
DC, Baltimore, Boston, and Atlanta are all around the same size and blow Detroit out of the water. Not to mention the metro areas that are around the same size, which you have to include to count UM.
You can continue to lie to yourself all you want, but Detroit is not attracting many people to the city with its higher education opportunities.
I had to look it up because of the now multiple Detroit apologists who are acting like Brentwood is on the moon and Pasadena is on Mars to make sure I wasn't completely losing my mind. UM is 43 miles from downtown Detroit, and there isn't some sort of express route guaranteed to be traffic-free that you can take to get there. Like I said before, that's about the same distance from Philly to Princeton, and no one is talking about how essential Princeton is to the city of Philadelphia. I get that it's somewhat different, but it's also not that different.
Detroit lags behind most major US cities (including many that are smaller) when it comes to higher education. I'm not bashing the city when I say that, it's just a fact.
Also remember that plenty of people went on to do great things without “world class” degree. I know people who went to UofM who MC pub trivia for a living, and I know people who went to smaller public universities in Michigan and are multimillionaires. The name on the paper only takes you so far.
I really enjoyed MacHack.
although it may also be that I am just a cynic.
4.5 hrs drive to Toronto, 4.5 hrs to Chicago, 3 hrs to Columbus and Cleveland. 45 minutes to Ann Arbor. Growing up in Detroit, I partied hard in these locations with my friend. Friday if we were not local, we would head out to one of these cities and go party. If you are into water, lots of lakes, local beaches, if you are into hiking, lots of trails. Wanna ski? Got it. Foodie? Unbelievable great spots, tons of ethnic food. Get to know people and discover those hole in the wall joints that are amazing. The only reason not to stay in the Detroit area is if you can't find a job, but if you can get a job and work remote? Worth it.
Or how about "program to incent people to move to Detroit"