I've lived in the Detroit metro area for 13 years, and last May, I started working in downtown Detroit.
For those of you who haven't been there, it isn't like what you would imagine. It is not some post-apocolyptic wasteland inhabited by flesh eating zombies. There are probably run down areas of your own home town that look a lot like areas in Detroit, the difference is that in Detroit, there are more of them, and they are close together. Detroit is not completely devoid of nice areas, good resturants, and beautiful buildings. There are relatively new baseball and football stadiums, three brand new casinos (not my thing, but...), a nice river walk, parks, etc...
The city government has been completely negligent for at least 30 years, and most of the residents who gave a sh*t moved out of the city into one of the surrounding cities years ago. There is very little new investment within the city limits because it is very difficult (impossible) to make a buisness case to deal with the corruption and taxes involved in building something in Detroit, when you can probably get more benefit in a location less than 10 miles away.
For 13 years I've looked across the DMZ near Wyoming street (the locals might know what I'm talking about) pondering ways to rebuild Detroit, and I still don't know if it could be done. In other cities, the land is valuable because it is in the center of the action where everyone wants to be. Detroit has enough freeways so that you can navigate around the donut of surrounding communities without much trouble, so that most people can (and do) avoid going into the city.
One building I drive by every day is the Book Tower. This used to be the tallest building in Michigan. It is a simply gorgeous building. In Chicago or New York, or in just about any other city, this building would be worth $100s of millions, maybe even a billion dollars. Here in Detroit, it is just about vacant. There are a lot of big buildings downtown that are vacant with no windows. The Michigan Railroad Terminal across from old Tiger Stadium is a modern ruin. You can see the beauty that must have been there, and then recognize that you are looking at a corpse.
One idea that is floating around that I hope comes to fruition is a change in the City charter to make council members representatives of districts instead of being elected by the city at large. There is very little accountability in city government, and if a particular part of town had it's own representative, perhaps the voters in a region could hold their particular council member accountable. At least then there would be some hope that at least one region of the city could start to rebuild.
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