Getting down in Motown

This past weekend, I went to Detroit, as my brother was watching an NFL game between the Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings (Vikings won, so my bro was happy). I stayed there for less than 2 days, but it was a rather interesting 2 days.

Now, I recall a thread being posted on this blog about Toronto being a beta city. If you really think that...come to Detroit! It really puts everything in perspective. Detroit may have a similar metropolitan area population to Toronto, and it may be located in close proximity, but the two cities are worlds apart economically, socially, and in terms of how they feel altogether.

I was absolutely amazed how few people there were walking around in the downtown core of such a large city. Literally, I see way more pedestrians on King Street in downtown Kitchener (not even that great a downtown) than on Woodward Street (Detroit's main strip). So of course, that doesn't even begin to compare Woodward to Yonge. It is the only city I've seen of even heard of that has completely abandoned skyscrapers. There was very little retail, to the point where I took my mother 30 minutes out to the suburbs to go shopping. Speaking of which, there is no mass transit in Detroit, excluding this little joke called 'the people mover'. It is the size of one of those VIVA busses and it basically operates as a monorail making a circle around the downtown core, which no one uses. So in other words, it's pretty much useless. And all of the city busses I saw coming downtown had virtually no one in them. I was talking with some of the people at the reception desk in our hotel. Detroit proper, with about 900,000 people, has no malls in its city limits. NONE!! Let's compare that to the tri-city region I am from, with 520,000 people and 3 major regional indoor malls, among many other different forms of shopping centers abound. Apparently it's even common for residents of inner city Detroit to bus it out to the suburbs to get their groceries.

Economically, Detroit has stark contrasts between the city and its suburbs. Detroit proper was traditionally a very blue collar city. In the past few decades, damn near all of the industry has become vacant, leaving a massive inventory of vacant industrial sites across the city. If GM and Ford go under, that's pretty much the last straw for the city. With the advent of racial tensions and riots between Whites and Blacks a few decades ago, a lot of housing had went vacant as well, with many empty lots and boarded up houses attesting to that. In constrast, vacant houses are nearly non-existent in most Canadian cities. Even vacant industrial buildings are becoming scarce in dynamic, fast-growing cities like Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo, as they are being snatched up by developers and turned into upscale lofts. In the suburbs, it is much the same story as any city, except that Detroit's suburbs are remarkably affluent in constrast to the central city. They are full of mega-malls and large office complexes, much like you see throughout the 905 belt. Some suburbs, such as Dearborn, are quite multi-ethnic/racial, much like in Toronto's 905. Dearborn has a large Arab population, along with Whites and middle-class Blacks, flying in the face of this outdated idea that only White people live in the suburbs. The central city is much less diverse, inhabited primarily by Blacks living below the poverty line.

Detroit does have some strengths over Toronto, however. One of the things that startled me was its architectural legacy, a product of Detroit being older and more matured than Toronto. Downtown Detroit has absolutely gorgeous buildings, mostly of the gothic and art-deco styles. I can only imagine how great a city Detroit could be if all of these buildings were occupied! Toronto, in constrast, is full of bland and modernist buildings. The financial district was largely redeveloped through the 1960s-1980s and the condos popping up all over the place amount to a sort of vertical sprawl of glass (especially on the waterfront). Another bonus about Detroit is the lack of homeless people and panhandlers. In just about every major Canadian city I've been to, you can't walk more than a couple downtown blocks without someone either asking you for change or sleeping on the sidewalk. In Detroit, I was never once asked for change. I guess it helps when you can get deals on housing like this...

http://realestate.nytimes.com/sales/detail/403-28067275/DETROIT-MI-MI-48205

Yes, you're reading that right. $1,500 for a house. Less than what I pay for a term of tuition! I would estimate this home to be valued at $200,000-250,000 here in Cambridge.

On to the photos!

(Read the rest here - Edit)