Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay
171 comments
·January 31, 2025RALaBarge
gcanyon
St. Louis is similar: you can walk from downtown to empty grass-filled blocks in about fifteen minutes.
My favorite story is the origin of the City Museum (which, shoutout to the City Museum, it's awesome). The City Museum building is in a former factory, it's about 11 stories tall and fills a city block. It's on the edge of downtown about a dozen blocks from the Arch. The artist behind the museum bought the building in the '90s for something like $700,000. That's a whole-ass industrial building, walkable from anywhere in downtown St. Louis, for under a million dollars.
ZeroGravitas
They also filmed Escape from New York there in 1981 so they didn't have to spend any money on making a post-apocalyptic cityscape!
https://www.riverfronttimes.com/arts/how-a-1976-st-louis-fir...
dgfitz
I think most US cities are like that in the “downtown to disheveled in 15 minutes” sense.
gcanyon
I've lived in Los Angeles, Seattle, D.C., New York, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Boston. I've spent time in Phoenix, San Francisco, Kansas City, Chicago, Miami, Portland, Atlanta, and Orlando. None of them come close to what you see in St. Louis. As a disclaimer, I always tell people, every bad thing you hear about St. Louis is true, and worse than you've heard -- but also that the many, many good things about St. Louis are never mentioned, and that's a shame. It's a long list and the City Museum is high on it.
But that said, check out this completely empty block on Delmar and 21st [1], and remember that with the Arch, that's less than 20 blocks from the river. And five blocks north of there is the former site of Pruitt Igoe, which is basically six or so blocks of wilderness behind a chain link fence. I don't doubt there are cities in worse shape (Detroit probably being one of them), but none that I've explored.
cobertos
I'm not quite so sure. The amount of demolished blight in Detroit has left this eerie urban meadow feeling to a decent amount of areas in the vicinity of downtown. Walking the empty streets with empty lots and a few normal or a few burnt out houses is peaceful and fun in a way you wouldn't expect. I haven't seen it in a lot of cities.
null
ghaff
I was in Detroit for a big tech event a couple years back. The more or less universal consensus was that, yes, the Riverwalk during the day (and the Convention Center there) were quite nice. But people felt uncomfortable away from large groups of event-goers at night and there were a few incidents. It definitely felt different from other events I've been to. Some of this is admittedly probably a matter of familiarity; I generally know to just avoid the Tenderloin for example.
nojs
> This piece is nothing but an advertisement for Dan Gilbert.
For an outlet that “thanks to our reader-funded model, what we cover isn’t dictated by the algorithms of the tech titans” they did manage to cram a surprising number of ads in there
scythe
There is also the secular trend. Detroit's dominance in the auto industry wasn't an accident. Iron was mined in the Iron Range in Minnesota and shipped across the Great Lakes to Detroit. It was natural for manufacturing to occur there. Other GL cities had similar advantages, but e.g. Alabama wasn't a realistic competitor. Coal was also shipped, mostly from the Allegheny region, west across Lake Erie.
Today, less iron is refined domestically, and cars are made of more aluminum and less steel. Most coking-quality coal is now mined in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. On top of that, the US shipbuilding industry has become less competitive globally, which together with the Jones Act has resulted in a significant drop in shipping on the Lakes. See Figure 2 on page 2:
guywithahat
> who the Big 3 have abandoned for a profit.
I don’t think anyone left Detroit willingly; they were forced out due to race riots, threats to their life, and the UAW. The big 3 lost billions trying to revive the city in spite of the local politicians
If your book implies or says it was somehow due to greed, you should respectfully find a new book.
garciansmith
Sugrue's "The Origins of the Urban Crisis" has a much more nuanced thesis, and part of it is that people were leaving well before the 1967 Uprising, part of it was broader economic changes, part of it was governmental policies (especially with regards to housing and transportation).
The causes of the decline of Detroit's population are complex, not something that can be distilled in an HN comment honestly. But the idea that no one left Detroit willingly is not correct. I know people who did, even interviewed someone who said their family left due to simple racism: a Black family moved to their neighborhood so they left. Of course, in many cases choices could be weighted by other things like, say, you wanted to purchase a house but couldn't get a mortgage in the city due to extensive redlining but could easily get one in the suburbs.
Yeul
My family left the city in order to raise children. We tend to forget that cities can turn bad fast when there is an economic crash. They are the first places to be hit with drugs and crime.
RALaBarge
That's cool. Feel free to leave a reference or something. From the Wiki description:
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit is the first book by historian and Detroit native Thomas J. Sugrue in which he examines the role race, housing, job discrimination, and capital flight played in the decline of Detroit. Sugrue argues that the decline of Detroit began long before the 1967 race riot. Sugrue argues that institutionalized and often legalized racism resulted in sharply limited opportunities for African Americans in Detroit for most of the 20th century. He also argues that the process of deindustrialization, the flight of investment and jobs from the city, began in the 1950s as employers moved to suburban areas and small towns and also introduced new labor-saving technologies. The book has won multiple awards including a Bancroft Prize in 1998
tokioyoyo
I was there about a year ago with a couple of friends, stopped for a night while driving through Michigan to go up north. It was just so eerie throughout the entire day. Incredibly wide streets, but sometimes you would walk for 5 mins before you saw a single soul. Maybe because it was a bit of a chilly day as well, but it felt like the city was built for way more people, and there just isn’t enough now.
ghaff
Other people makes a big difference.
Even back when NYC was a lot more iffy than it is today in general, I never really felt uncomfortable walking down somewhere like Fifth Avenue late at night because there were enough people at night. Various midwest cities can be pretty eerie--especially after business hours. The downtowns are often not that busy during the day and they're deserted--except maybe some local pockets--after dark.
Yeul
This is an interesting point. In the 1980s Amsterdam was dirt poor but it was never empty. In fact it attracted all kinds of people who wanted to live an "alternative" lifestyle in cheap real estate. Communists, artists, gay people.
New York no matter what happens will always be located in the most densely populated part of America.
qudat
It’s a commuter town: people drive in at 8am and leave at 5pm. The greater Detroit area is massive.
ghaff
I've found that in some Midwest cities that weren't even necessarily blighted. I remember Kansas City at an event years ago where there was basically no one in the downtown at night. The same is somewhat true of even someplace like the Financial District of Boston after hours but there are enough people pretty close by it doesn't feel the same.
qudat
I live in A2 as well and I don’t even bother looking for gigs here. Duo used to be the tech company to work for here but they were bought by Cisco which is not really my vibe. Barracuda is another big name but other than that I cannot name many others.
randcraw
In Ann Arbor the name of the game is small startups, often derived from U Michigan professors. There are enough of those you can make a career there, though it's wise to expand your network to include other towns within 30 minutes (like Plymouth or Novi). You won't want to rely on only UofM for work, though I know a few who have worked there in computing for decades.
francisofascii
I'm curious if Lansing, the capital of Michigan, offers opportunities for government contractor work due to its proximity. With Lansing, Detroit, and Ann Arbor relatively close to each other, semi-remote roles might be feasible.
bityard
I lived in Lansing 10 years ago. Honestly, it was pretty depressing. We lived in an old neighborhood between the downtown area and south Lansing which while not conventionally dangerous, was an area I always avoided driving or walking around at night if I could avoid it. The west side is fine but bland, a mix of suburban and apartment living. East Lansing is more interesting due to being a college town. The outlying towns are bedroom communities with fairly high property values.
Work-wise, there were mostly small businesses or branches of large national brands. I tried to get into government work several times but never made it. There were LOADS of non-profits (some government affiliated) who would take just about anyone with a pulse but the pay was quite low as well.
After about a decade there, we moved 45 minutes east and never looked back.
bityard
> We lived in an old neighborhood between the downtown area and south Lansing
Too late for me to edit but in case someone comes back and reads this later, I want to be clear that south Lansing was the place I'd avoid at night, not the neighborhood I lived in.
RALaBarge
I really love my state, but lansing is just as bad as anywhere else. Outside of a more rural situtation or Ann Arbor, everywhere here is decayed.
fzzzy
Lansing has been the epitome of what the rust belt means for decades already.
cebert
I live in the greater Detroit area and would love for it to become a thriving tech community. While articles like this portray a thriving tech scene here, it’s not entirely accurate. Many automotive companies claim a need for tech talent but establish labs and locations in the Bay Area. For instance, Rivian’s vehicle software isn’t developed in Michigan, despite being HQed here.
The prominent tech employers in our area are Rocket, United Wholesale Mortgage, and GM. I believe our tech talent lacks the competitiveness of other tech hubs. I hope the state of Michigan can take proactive steps to enhance the appeal of our state and Detroit as desirable tech locations, but we must acknowledge that we are not yet a thriving tech hub.
toyg
The tech company I work for is listed on the NASDAQ and headquartered in Birmingham, a few minutes out of Detroit - originally it was in Rochester. There is a lot of money in Michigan. The main issue I can see is that you have to be in the right circles - there is definitely a class divide in the state, and it's pretty brutal.
whaleofatw2022
Yeah class divides are weird in Southeast MI.
At smaller shops it leads to a lot of hubris from management. I've worked at more than one shop where circles of UofM grads insist on outsourcing everything new and having in-house employees only do maintenance or minor features. If you didn't go to UofM your opinion is worthless.
Leads to incredibly toxic shops and terrible software.
pc86
Which is kind of funny since you're talking about UofM, not Stanford or MIT. It's a good school but there are literally hundreds of good schools in the US.
In my experience lots of folks educated at top top tier institutions are pretty humble about it, and acknowledge places where other institutions are as good or better than their alma mater. A coworker of mine recently got his MBA from Penn which is not only Ivy League but consistently ranked top 2-3 MBA programs in the country, and currently tied with Stanford for #1 according to USNWR. He never brings it up, doesn't really talk about it much when it does get brought up, and I don't think I've ever heard him criticize anyone's education or experience unfairly (we've sat on several hiring panels together).
The problem is when you go to a good-not-great school. If the top 10 schools for a particular program are considered "Tier 1" the people who went to #15 or #20 are going to be absolutely horrible to work with. It's like they think they need to prove they could have gone to a better school but didn't for whatever reason.
I avoided this trap by only going to small schools nobody has ever heard of.
neilv
I've seen that kind of thinking by some grads of MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, too. I think it's a minority of them, but not-unusual.
My position is, if you want a lifestyle company (and maybe a self-congratulatory echo chamber), then maybe it's fine to be a "<school> shop". But if you want to hire the best people, and be informed by a d-v-rs-ty of perspectives and experiences, then you really need to not be so insular.
technotarek
As a native (suburban) Detroiter (who departed 20 years ago), I don’t want to throw shade but articles like these rarely give a good sense of the size or scope of decades of decay. There are still miles (and miles) of apocalyptic looking neighborhoods. As a teenager, we had our pick of hundreds of abandoned warehouses to party (“rave”).
I'd love to see it flourish, and maybe if the area could get past its car addiction, I’d even want to call it home again one day.
*Removed inaccurate statement about the city’s size.
psion
There are some serious attempts at removing the car addiction. The qLine rail goes down Woodward avenue providing a rather nice alternative to the bus systems, and the I have heard recently there are talks to expand the People Mover as it was intended when it was designed. I'm hoping that the bus systems make efforts to bounce back and start serving the suburbs better.
gs17
Were those talks to expand it post-QLine? I'd like to see it expanded, but I thought QLine kind of took over a lot of what was intended for it.
dcchambers
I really thought the major "rust belt" cities were going to blow up after the big COVID WFH push. Why spend 2-10x as much to live in one of four coastal metros when you could get the same pay while living somewhere much cheaper. The biggest issue with these cities in the last 50 years has been a lack of high paying jobs and WFH tech jobs essentially negate that issue.
There are a ton of American cities that have fallen from their former glory but are full of cheap housing, interesting things, and lots of history.
Shame it doesn't seem like that has panned out much.
yardie
The sun belt took wind out of their sails. And even they are starting to see softening demand. Miami just cancelled an A-class commercial high rise due to weak demand. In Austin, rents are tanking.
It’s very hard to revive a town or city when the tax base is way down. I thought Detroit was going to succeed but they simply have too much ground to manage with their revenue. And there isn’t a way to shrink a shrinking city.
nradov
Insurance premium increases have killed a lot of the housing cost advantage that Florida used to have.
boringg
And Canadians have been shedding property in droves due to high cost (USD-CAD), your comment on insurance and general antagonistic policies at a Federal level.
arrowsmith
Why are the premiums going up? Hurricanes?
jollyllama
>It’s very hard to revive a town or city when the tax base is way down. I thought Detroit was going to succeed but they simply have too much ground to manage with their revenue. And there isn’t a way to shrink a shrinking city.
That's one way to look at it. The problems of decades of urban decay make these places unattractive to outsiders, so it's a catch-22.
toast0
> And there isn’t a way to shrink a shrinking city.
You could probably disincorporate parts of the city, but I assume that would require consent of the owners/residents and the county. Of course, reducing the incorporated area also reduces revenue, so it might leave you with similar revenue vs cost mismatches, but a smaller area.
skybrian
The decline in rents in the Austin area is due to building more housing, according to this article:
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
ec109685
It also stopped growing rapidly: https://www.austintexas.gov/news/new-census-data-austin-metr...
oldpersonintx
[dead]
no_wizard
Most companies will cut your pay based on where you live, though.
You aren’t usually paid the same. That isn’t the norm.
Secondly and probably more important is there is zero guarantees that WFH will be supported by the work places they can support it will, we have seen a huge RTO surge. I’d hate to be in one of these cities and get that call.
If WFH opportunities had legal protections and incentives it’d be a different story I imagine
dcchambers
Yes, in some cases location-based pay is a thing.
But $150K in Detroit feels a hell of a lot richer than $250K in SF.
pc86
Whether or not locality-based pay is the norm is an open question. Every place I've ever worked had a budget for the role and that was that, but most places I've worked only hire folks within the US who don't need visa sponsorship so that's already a smaller group than "anyone who can type JavaScript into a computer."
Would you rather live and rent in NYC and work from home for 4 years until asked to commute again, or live and rent in Detroit or Pittsburgh or Indianapolis and take that $50-400k you saved and move?
Moving is easy and if you need to move to support an RTO mandate, especially if you were hired remote and weren't local you can almost certainly negotiate some relocation assistance. It's not a big deal to move unless you have kids in school which if you went remote during COVID and had a kid basically immediately is still likely not a huge issue. Moving in middle school or high school can be impactful, moving during kindergarten or first grade is a nothingburger.
ghaff
Even if there aren't location-based salaries as such, there's a lot of "ROFL, we're not going to match your Facebook offer." I worked for someone who eventually ended up with very few California employees and, I believe, eventually closed their relatively small office there.
>Moving is easy
I disagree with this. If you have a relatively small number of possessions living by yourself in an apartment, maybe. But, as you say, with a partner and even kids with an established circle of friends—and maybe a house, is definitely not easy.
tombert
Yeah, that's part of the reason I haven't left NYC.
I've wanted to leave here for a couple years but I have been afraid that if I moved to a more rural area, I'd have trouble finding work if there was ever a huge return to office, in which case I might be forced to move back to a big city and I'd have to buy a house for a lot more than I paid.
Telemakhos
There's a major issue in American cities that is unmentionable in polite society: the so-called Curley Effect [0], named after a Boston politician who drove the old Boston Brahmins out of their city by taxing them out of town and pandering to Irish immigrants, making the city as a whole poorer. It turns out that politics is not so straightforward as to reward politicians who improve their cities: instead, a politician can leverage group (ethnic, racial, whatever) differences to reward supporters with largesse designed to render them dependent on the politician, while driving out those who, by nature of their independence, could oppose the politician. In effect, there is a substantial likelihood that American cities decay because politicians consolidate power through the kinds of high taxes and poor services that drive away high earners.
WFH workers are very independent: they could move to a city or from it with no regard for the job market. That makes them prime targets for eliminating from a city under the Curley effect.
[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shleifer/files/curley_effe...
1123581321
It is happening, but it takes time as those cities can only grow as fast as palatable housing stock comes online. The largest percentage growths in home values, with short days on market, have have been in Rockford, Akron, Fort Wayne, Lansing, etc. There is new construction in all of these markets, but much of it is from rehabbing old manufacturing buildings, another limiter, or from a mix of public and private money that city government can only consider so quickly. Economic growth is mostly in services to support the remote jobs. Building new primary businesses (sell out of local market) might never happen. So they look just as sleepy as ever even though there’s a lot of activity in housing and new transplants.
schmichael
> Why spend 2-10x as much to live in one of four coastal metros
I think you answered your own question: it’s not (entirely) an economic decision. Weather, culture, nature, civic amenities. There’s a lot in life that money can’t buy. Sure I could own a McMansion on a palatial plot of prairie, but what if the square footage of my house and acreage of my yard isn’t what’s important to me?
Yeul
Being surrounded by Christian conservative Trump voters is not how everyone wants to live their life.
HN probably consists of a lot of people who are perfectly content spending their entire life looking at a screen perfectly oblivious of what is going on.
tokioyoyo
Generally, people like to have fun and will pay premiums to live in cities where stuff happens. Cheap housing and money aren’t the only motivators, otherwise we would have a different landscape.
BobaFloutist
That said, cheap housing/warehouse space often leads to an explosion of art and music in sufficiently populated cities.
ghaff
Generally is doing a lot of work there. There are vast suburbs (including Silicon Valley) and exurbs in the US even before you get genuinely rural.
I can drive an hour into some large cities where "fun happens" although I have lots of activities around where I live too.
jt2190
Housing is cheap because the job market is poor. Should enough remote workers choose to relocate to the same rust-belt city we’d see higher housing prices in that city. The challenge is that rust-belt cities are just not desirable enough for enough remote workers to reverse the decades of decline. Furthermore, there is no reason that remote workers would cluster by geography other than fear of loosing their remote job and having to return to office, so I don’t think remote workers will be able to turn the tide of the rust-belt.
Qwertious
>Furthermore, there is no reason that remote workers would cluster by geography other than fear
Amenities. Some things (and communities) just aren't available elsewhere. And some people just value their local identity too much to move.
jt2190
> Amenities
Yes, but what amenities do rust-belt cities have exclusively, that other cities can’t compete with?
> … [Some] people just value their local identity too much.
Sure, but I assume that there just aren’t enough of these types to stop the decline of the rust-belt, otherwise we’d see more resilience of their populations.
agoodusername63
I was really hoping for this too.
I love WFH and I hope I never have to work in an office again. I was hoping the obvious financial efficiency improvements would have made the concept stick more and enable more mobility in the US
unfortunately it looks like we couldn't get over our need for employee control even for types of work that is largely online anyways. I'm still sad that it isn't likely to grow much.
yawgmoth
In my experience, companies based in Michigan pay 20-50k lower and do not have staff/principal roles available. You have to find a remote role to stay competitive wage wise. Some companies are not willing to pay as much for Michigan workers as they are NY/SF/elsewhere workers, too.
I think the reality is Columbus and Chicago are growing quicker than Detroit. The relative increase here might be "buzzing" but in absolute terms, it's desolate.
pc86
Don't you think the delta in cost of living between Michigan and NYC/SF is a lot more than $50k/yr?
qudat
I live in Ann Arbor and I think you would be surprised by the CoL here. I’m not claiming sf/nyc numbers but it’s pretty close to Chicago numbers
2 bed 1k sqft condo downtown will costs you $800k-1mil
AngryData
To be fair, there are also a lot of rural areas not far outside Ann Arbor that are still fairly cheap, although obviously not as cheap as more rural areas farther north.
Ann Arbor has always been a pretty unique place that pushes pricing up above normal. UofM is a large college that has lots of international draw, it holds the best medical facilities in the entire state, and have uniquely liberal laws within the city and the city itself puts an effort towards keeping out state cops. In I believe 1972 they made marijuana possession a mere $5 fine within the city, while the rest of the state would bring the hammer down on people for it, and so it was de facto legal there and the city held Hash Bash ever year since with people all smoking up in public while the rest of the state had people worried about cops finding a single seed or roach in their vehicle.
pc86
It looks like the big issue with Ann Arbor is supply. I just pulled up Chicago Zillow for this criteria (1-1.25k sqft, 2 bed exact, 1+ bath, condos only, for sale not rent) and am having trouble finding one for more than $700k. Lots in the $350-400k range. Overall there are hundreds, with almost every block having at least one in the "nice" downtown area.
Leaving criteria the same and switching to Ann Arbor, I see four, with only one of them actually being downtown, for $725k (but the other three are all under $300k). I would consider Ann Arbor more expensive than Chicago, at least for this type of unit, but not necessarily because there's more demand.
coolyd
This is a pretty interesting take.
Anyone concerned with cost of living should not be considering a condo downtown. Overall the COL in detroit is around 45% lower for real estate and over 25% cheaper groceries versus new york. There will always be overpriced condos available.
guywithahat
> companies based in Michigan pay 20-50k lower
I think this happens in a lot of second-tier cities and it’s really frustrating. I’m currently interviewing for neuralink and they pay 30k less in Austin (which isn’t even really a second tier city) compared to Fremont; frankly I’d rather live in Austin but Fremont is more desirable with the pay boost.
Whoever thought up the line “it costs more to live here so we deserve more” was a genius. Logically you should get less if you live somewhere expensive since the companies rent and operating expenses are also more expensive, but I guess not
Andrew-Koper
There's a lot of good stuff going on in Detroit. I've worked in tech in Detroit for quite some time. The NewLab building that opened a year ago next to the recently-rehabbed, stunningly-beautiful, gigantic Michigan Central, is one-block by one-block and several stories tall and an amazing innovation hub. GM and Ford are two of the largest companies in the world, and - this isn't obvious because of their main industry - each employ 4,000-6,000 tech and software engineers. Dan Gilbert is an ultra-successful, entrepreneur genius, and he and his companies support an entrepreneurial culture and ecosystem in downtown Detroit.
If you're a ycombinator type person, and you move to Detroit, you're going to live in a cool neighborhood like Woodbridge, Corktown, Hubbard Farms, Midtown, Milwaukee Junctions, etc; go out for drinks at Ladder 4, Motor City Wine, Kiesling, etc; go out to eat at Ima, Baobab Fare, Batch, etc; go out for entertainment at Spot Lite, Lincoln Street Art Park, Outer Limits etc; and enjoy all of the culture.
dhfbshfbu4u3
Detroit is buzzing because it’s gone through a complete and total deflation. Things are up because they went so far down, not unlike say… Argentina today or the rest of the US in 3-5 years.
santoshalper
Pretty much. At some point there is nowhere to go but up. Still, it's nice to see.
jonhohle
Dead cat bounce.
snapcaster
There is some truth to this, but i worry detroit is just doing the same thing that blew them out last time (overdependence on a small group of extremely rich businessmen that can leave at any time). Hope this works out for them, Detroit has really suffered since the automakers left (and the riots)
aketchum
I interviewed for an internship at Ford in probably 2015. It was striking to me that they spent basically half the interview hyping up Detroit and convincing me that it would be a fun city to spend time in. It was clear that the company knew one of its biggest challenges to hiring was the location. Glad to hear things are improving but the reputation of Detroit still has a ways to go.
GenerWork
I left Michigan about 3 years ago after living around Detroit for 7 years. Tech jobs there are primarily with the Big 3, and the cult known as Rocket. There are places like Ann Arbor, but again, the opportunities are limited.
As for Detroit itself, I feel like I've seen this headline every year for the past decade. I'm not saying that Detroit hasn't made progress (it absolutely has, go visit the refurbished train station), but compared to other cities it's still lagging.
eduction
Detroit’s homicide rate as of January is about 4x the national average, 31.9 per 100k vs 7.4 nationally.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/20...
add-sub-mul-div
Like any city most of these would happen in easily avoidable areas and there's no reason to live in fear about it unless you're one of those people for whom it's a hobby.
eduction
Not “like any city,” that’s the point. Other cities do have areas like that and still manage to have a fraction of the homicides of Detroit.
“It’s a revival!”
“Isnt crime still super high?”
“It’s a revival in the nice neighborhoods!”
knowitnone
"easily avoidable areas" as if criminals don't have cars?
AngryData
Law enforcement is not equally distributed so criminals also avoid certain areas to commit crimes in because they know they will get caught or killed by police if they do. But that also means they know certain low population density dilapidated areas that cops (and most everyone else) avoid, where they can easily get away with crimes, because not only are there no cops anywhere near, but the few people in those areas know not to talk to the police and help them catch you because they know they have basically zero protections living in that area from retribution.
Detroit is a very expansive place, and there is basically zero reason to go into the run down dangerous areas unless you are also dirt poor or involved in criminal enterprise.
DoctorOetker
The Detroit Exodus quickened after the racial riots.
There was a police unit enforcing the racial oppression (STRESS).
It was disbanded after a certain event: Southern Airways Flight 49 hijacking.
3 individuals, intimidated by the local Detroit government decided to take matters in their own hands: hijacking a plane (which was common up to the ~70's, since people were allowed to bring their weapons on the plane, back then the reasoning was that its more cost effective to deal with zest-for-life hijackers in the air), but not just hijacking a plane, they threatened to crash it into an Oak Ridge nuclear reactor (or more plausibly the surface storage). After a few back and forths they got a few million, some bullet proof vests and some parachutes. At some point a gun was fired and one of the pilots got hit in the arm. They tried to land in Cuba but were sent back by Fidel Castro (accepting these highjackers was figuratively radioactive), after refuel and some more flying around they tried landing in Cuba again. This time they were allowed to land, but then immediately arrested and went to prison in Cuba for ~7 years, then extradited to the US, sat in prison for another ~7 years.
Shortly after this event: the STRESS police unit was disbanded, US airports finally installed metal detectors and X-ray scanners.
According to interviews the hijackers were willing to die and were serious about the threat to crash the plane and cause release of nuclear materials if their demands were not met.
Were they civil rights activists or violent terrorists?
That is a false dilemma, one can be both at the same time.
30 miles West in Ann Arbor, there are tech gigs but not tons of them. If you are apart of the University of Michigan, there are tons of opportunities via the college and the groups there, but if not there aren't tons of openings.
Detroit itself is an amazing city, but it isn't a tech hub, nor is it for everyone. It is the shell of the automotive companies that started to move their operations of out the country in the 50s-70s. Check out the book "Origins of the Urban Crisis" to get an understanding of the decay in Detroit and other large cities who the Big 3 have abandoned for a profit.
All of my friends that I have brought to the D are always weirded out by how big the city is, yet how few people you actually see outside of the entertainment district. The streets and sidewalks can be fully empty, with a 6 lane road that has so many holes that it is more pothole than road now.
This piece is nothing but an advertisement for Dan Gilbert.