[nooron]

Thank you for telling your story. I think you are making very good points. I'm in favor of all the flashy development, and I don't think we should feel bad about building it. But the problems you cite here are the ones I worry we are neglecting, and I think your framing of the question at the end of your post is right on.

[mklim]

Yeah. I think we're on the same page. I think the flashy Greater Downtown development is generally positive, I don't mean to be down on it--that would be especially hypocritical of me, as a former Midtown young adult transplant--it's just that a lot of times it's portrayed through this lens where it's as if the city was this completely empty and barren wasteland and here is this new artisan coffee shop charging into the wilderness to save the world and Establish Civilization. When the city is not an empty wasteland. There are hundreds of thousands of people already living there, they've been living there for decades, and a fancy bakery is nice but probably isn't going to help them with any of the public infrastructure issues they've been actually struggling with and trying to get attention to for years and years now.

[pyre]

> There are hundreds of thousands of people already living there, they've been living there for decades

Detroit was a city of 2m at its peak. The budget crisis started when Detroit lost a bunch of Federal money when the 2004 census put the city population under 1m (~800k IIRC). No one thinks that it's a desolate wasteland (at least not that I've talked to). On the other hand, it's a city that was built to accommodate more then twice the current population (677k per Wikipedia). This is why there are a lot of open areas and abandoned neighbourhoods / buildings.

[mklim]

Of course, that's not what I'm trying to argue against. The fact that the city is vastly underpopulated per square mile is arguably one of the core sources of its public infrastructure issues. What I was trying to say is that there's still ~700k people already living there, who have been living there for decades, but the angle of a lot of the "Detroit comeback" press is to focus entirely on how happy the new transplants and the surburban visitors are, and on their wants/needs, and to ignore the hundreds of thousands of people that have remained in the city this entire time. I'm speaking in generalities of course, but anecdotally it's an angle that I've seen come up in a lot of the press cycles about new developments in the city.