Detroit is the New Real Estate Boomtown

Detroit has a little “urban colony” around the Campus Martius where bougie “pioneers” have built upscale hotels, trendy bars and Whole Foods. It’s very cute.

It is also surrounded by hundreds on square miles of urban blight.

People who have not been to the Rust Belt simply cannot fathom the devastation that is depopulation.

Thirty years ago I said it would be thirty years before Detroit was worth investing in. I'm sorry I was right.

But I was wrong in thinking they'd have started to move on beyond auto dependency...but they haven't.

I haven't followed the re-renaissance of Detroit closely but obviously it's net with some success in that it's now longer possible to find once elegant and substantial houses for pocket change, nor to find great bargains of other sorts.

One of the fundamental problems of Detroit as I understood it is that it was not a typical city where the West Side or some large swath of the city was historically the prosperous bit, the naturally preserved area or naturally attractive to redevelopment and renewal.

Detroit, rather, was a city of nodes: of company towns each with its own socioeconomic rage of residential neighborhoods proximate to a factory complex. Owners mansions and middle class housing stock and cheaply built small houses for blue collar factory workers...and then another such cluster centered around another "company town" model and another and another. When the bottom fell out of these company-centric neighborhoods, it took everything down, the weight of the pull of the much more numerous low-end housing stock pulling the much smaller middle- and upper-income neighborhoods down with them.

This accounts for for many of the great broad neighborhoods of ruinous neighborhoods: housing in a deplorable state of maintenance with many abandoned, burned, and demolished buildings as far as the eye can see.

We've seen the HGTV programs of buying the grimmest houses in the city for a few thousand bucks, spending many times that in their renovation, then selling for something approaching $80K or $100K. Even having made very substantial headway in reducing the number if abandoned houses (perhaps 50% by the more optimistic estimations, but these are hard to gauge as some consider mortgage defaults and tax arrears abandonments apart from other forms of long term vacancy), the numbers are still grim. There are now a fair number if $1M+ (and almost $2M) condos for sale in Detroit. Progress, I guess

I just hate the crazy sprawl of the city and the tiny pockets of prosperity and vast areas of question marks. And the ugliness and constant cycle of optimism and closure in new businesses and new developments. It's not really a success story until the whole place feels different.

Once Detroit had amazing neighborhoods with spectacular housing and they were found all over the city. Near UofD, the Palmer Park areas, Indian village, and so many more.

Of course I am so old I I remember when Detroit had a great tram/ streetcar system and Briggs stadium.

Cleveland, which doesn't have miles of vacant lost like Detroit, actually has accomplished a lot more and has really leveraged the arts--downtown and neighborhoods on both sides of the city have had steady redeveloment over the last couple decades.

It's lovely, I had a mother who lived there once.

It's all the rage!