[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.