[iheartthed]

Would I? Yes. In fact, I am seriously considering it. But I'm from there, I have family there, and I follow the local news there fairly closely, so I understand the local culture. I may also be a little bit of a quasi-expert on gentrification, since I've witnessed the gentrification cycle in different parts of NYC over the past 13+ years. Would I recommend others to do it? It depends...

I met someone on a flight from Detroit to NYC last year that lives in NY but owns and manages real estate in Detroit. He had no prior connection to Detroit before he jumped in... Which I thought was extremely scary. But he spends a lot of time traveling there, instead of just managing it from afar, so it may work out for him. But there are some nuances to Detroit's real estate market that outsiders don't typically understand.

On the other hand, I think the only way to really stop Detroit from turning into a complete urban prairie is for naive outsiders to flood into the market. Pre-Dan Gilbert era, the key power brokers, in both the political and business communities, have been at best indifferent to the state of the city, and in many cases even hostile to it. But there is definitely a paradigm shift going on now that might make the future unlike the past. There are certainly a lot of naive outsiders flooding in, for sure.