[sneak]

Anyone who lives or works there is a fool.

I grew up there, and lived downtown for years before wising up.

Have a medical emergency and call 911? You're lucky if an ambulance shows up within an hour, if at all.

I've been robbed at gunpoint enough times for one lifetime. I'm tired of having to pick up my .45 as the first thing I do after landing at the airport and getting my rental car.

Tell me how cheap rent has to be to make it worth it?

No thanks. My family is there, I know tons and tons of people there, and know the city itself as well as the rest of the metro area like the back of my hand.

You couldn't pay me to live there.

There's a very good reason people run away from that place as if their lives depended on it. It's because they do.

[zenocon]

FUD. This is total nonsense. I've lived in and around Detroit for the greater part of my life. I've even lived in the Bay Area for a couple years. There have been tremendous strides to turn this city around even in the last 5 years. I don't live in the city now, but I do work downtown every day in the Ren Cen. Even in the last year alone, I've noticed things pick up in the downtown area. I'm glad you took your cranky hatred elsewhere.

[danso]

FWIW, government officials admit to the hour-long 911 waits:

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2013/07/19/emergency-manager-sho...

> [Gov.] Snyder said it’s been a long period of decline in Detroit, and now is the time to do something about it. With “unacceptable” 58-minute emergency response times, he said the 700,000 residents of Detroit deserve better.

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20100916/METRO08/9160409

(2010)

> Most shocking, perhaps, occurred when a building collapsed on six firefighters, half of whom were taken to the hospital in squad cars and fire trucks because there were no ambulances on the scene. If that is how people in uniform are treated, imagine what it is like for the average citizen in the dark of night.

>> Mack made a claim to Fox 2 News a few weeks ago that the average response time in Detroit for an ambulance to arrive on a 911 call is 12 minutes -- even while admitting that often there are no units available to get to calls.

According to that 2004 audit, the two-year average at that time was about 12 minutes. And that was before the city cut its paramedics and emergency medical technicians by nearly 40 percent.

As a comparison, the city of Grosse Pointe reports its average ambulance response is five minutes. Dearborn's is four minutes. Warren's is 5:35.

In 2005, there were 303 paramedics and EMTs working the streets and the EMS division of the Fire Department had a budget of nearly $25 million. Today there are just 188 paramedics with a budget of nearly $23 million. With that many fewer paramedics, what happened to their estimated $11.5 million in salaries and benefits?

[sneak]

The five square blocks around the rencen and the casino don't count, though you can't get emergency services there either.

It's not nonsense, you just don't use emergency services like police, EMS, or fire every day. That doesn't make it any less stupid to live somewhere they aren't available, though.

Enjoy unplowed streets and no street lights while things "pick up", though. Oh, wait, the rencen has a parking garage. Nevermind.

PS: obviously this "pick[ing] up" hasn't been reflected in tax revenues, eh?

[zenocon]

Listen, I'm really just fucking tired of people slagging Detroit. The people that are doing it always seem to fit the profile of this guy here, "I used to live there...I have relatives there...I visited there once..." -- quite frankly, fuck all y'all. We're doing fine in Detroit, we're making it better...slowly but surely.

[semiprivate]

we're making it better...slowly but surely

That's a feeling not a measurement. Clearly economically it's getting worse. And emergency services seem to be getting worse. What exactly is getting better?

All I'm saying is that, especially in crisis, the truth and measurement are far better than emotion. What exactly is getting better?

[sneak]

I lived there for 23 years. I am back for a week at least once a year.

If you're tired of people slagging on your town, maybe your town should be one that doesn't suck?

[cobrausn]

You know, saying someone recounting his personal experience of being robbed at gunpoint several times is 'spreading FUD' because you haven't (yet) seems... myopic.

[rmason]

Agree with you, the city is turning around. There's a spirit that wasn't there eighteen months ago. There's a vibrant and growing tech community. If you're not there its easy to miss it with the constant bombardment by the national media of what's called locally 'ruin porn'.

A group of us is having a civic hackathon this fall at the M@dison Oct 4-5 to celebrate the state's release of open API's for five themes: jobs, tourism, safety, veterans and foster kids.

If you want to see the real Detroit please join us:

http://www.codemichigan.com

[zenocon]

This guy gets it.

[ams6110]

I've only been in Detroit proper a few times, but this all comports with the general impression of a complete hellhole.

Hard to image a tech community "thriving" when basic city services and personal safety are so lacking.

[VladRussian2]

>Hard to image a tech community "thriving" when basic city services and personal safety are so lacking.

when you're young, your hormones is off the chart, you have several people like you around - you're thriving and you don't need basic city services like police coming to quiet down your party, and "personal safety" is for old, like 30ish - 40ish folks.

[cinquemb]

Its kinda funny when "personal safety" seems to be equated to having a police force at your beck and call. In my neighborhood growing up it was a mac 11 (or that's what kids wished for…) and some paranoia of everyone… including the police. :P

[temphn]

No one can "fix" Detroit because no one can even discuss the reasons why Detroit is Detroit. It's not Democrats (Seattle and the Bay Area are fine). It's not big companies (there do happen to be auto plants in other areas). It has to do with the great unmentionable taboos of modern American society.

To state why Detroit is Detroit is like saying that "Stalin was a dictator" in 1970s Russia[1]. It doesn't matter that the leaders[2] of the society acknowledged that as fact, or even that everyone knew that it was true on some level. You yourself can't state the truth about why Detroit is Detroit. Like in the 1970s USSR, you won't be shot, you will just probably lose your job and/or be forced into a public apology.

[1] http://www.volokh.com/2010/04/30/on-a-bus-in-kiev/

  I remember very little about my childhood in the Soviet 
  Union; I was only seven when I left. But one memory I have 
  is being on a bus with one of my parents, and asking 
  something about a conversation we had had at home, in which 
  Stalin and possibly Lenin were mentioned as examples of 
  dictators. My parent took me off the bus at the next stop, 
  even though it wasn’t the place we were originally going...

  What’s more, this is so even though most people, including 
  most Communists, knew that Stalin was of course a dictator. 
  The government itself had acknowledged as much. Even Lenin 
  was widely understood to have been a dictator in the sense 
  of someone who didn’t govern through democratic means.

  But it’s not the sort of thing that you’d want to say in 
  public, or even to your friends in private. Sssh! — people 
  might hear! Those who hear might draw deeper inferences 
  about what else you might believe. This might get back to 
  the place you work. You might be fired, or blacklisted. By 
  the 1970s, you probably didn’t have to worry much about 
  being shot, or being sent to Siberia; these were not the 
  1930s. But lost jobs, ruined careers — sure. And a forced 
  public apology: well, of course, that might help a bit.

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/president-obamas-rema...

  Now, this isn’t to say that the African-American community 
  is naive about the fact that African-American young men are 
  disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, 
  that they are disproportionately both victims and 
  perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that 
  fact, although black folks do interpret the reasons for 
  that in a historical context.

  We understand that some of the violence that takes place in 
  poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of 
  a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty 
  and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be 
  traced to a very difficult history.

  And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds 
  to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African-
  American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse 
  is given, well, there are these statistics out there that 
  show that African-American boys are more violent -- using 
  that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently 
  causes pain.

  I think the African-American community is also not naive in 
  understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon 
  Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by 
  a peer than he was by somebody else.

[rdl]

It's clearly not just due to black people, either, though. Atlanta has a large black population, and is a pretty decent city (it has problems, sure, but so do other places). And there are cities with largely-non-black populations which also suck in the same kind of ways as Detroit.

Any city with a massive decline in population (which was probably triggered by racial issues and bad governance in the 1960s, a time when a violent armed revolution, at least at the local level, was quite possible) is going to have problems. Detroit had a heavily union population, reflected in the government as well, so unlike mining/etc. ghost towns, the "hangover" from the massive decline in population was a lot more unsustainable (in a place like Butte, people just left when industry left).

Sure, the decline into a war zone hurt, and compounded all the initial problems, but NYC was a warzone in the 1970s/1980s too, and didn't die. LA and Miami in the 1980s/1990s. I mean, even Oakland is somewhat turning around now (largely on the strength of SFBA overall and an artificially limited housing market in SF, true, not internal improvement.)

[temphn]

The numbers are quite different. Detroit is 82.7% black, while Atlanta is 54% black:

http://www.bestplaces.net/compare-cities/atlanta_ga/detroit_...

Numbers matter. Political control and on-the-ground police haven't flipped over entirely yet to Camden, NJ or Gary, IN levels.