The Great Canadian Towns and Villages Thread

[north 42]

Originally Posted by Hali87

I was in Detroit earlier this year, and while the city as a whole is obviously in pretty rough shape (thousands of abandoned/decaying/"missing" buildings, entire neighbourhoods foreclosed, public services streched extremely thin, etc.), the Midtown area basically just feels like a fairly standard North American city (maybe that's an understatement - there's a huge university presence, and things like the DIA that you won't necessarily find in other places). Downtown was... well not totally abandoned (there were certainly restaurants, bars, stadiums and casinos), but that said, I'd hesitate to call it "vibrant". Downtown Halifax, and Downtown London, both feel much more vibrant in terms of number of people you see, number of options in terms of dining/drinking/businesses, lack of conspicuous abandonment, and scale of land taken up by parking. Metro Detroit is about 10x the population of either Halifax or London. The difference between Detroit and Toronto/Mtl (where I went immediately afterwards) was, well, almost impossible to exaggerate. At the time, there were still tax breaks, but I think they were mostly for businesses.

Detroit is far from being totally dead, and is an interesting place in its own right, but it definitely has less "bustle" than what I'd expect from a city with a million+ metro. There are small pockets of activity where things feel "normal" (ie. you can easily find a bar or restaurant and not be the only person there) but "vibrant" to me implies crowds, variety, excitement. These things were conspicuously lacking in most of the city, including most of the downtown.

If you had seen what DT Detroit looked like a decade ago, you would be amazed at how far it has come, especially in the last 5 years. The city still has a long way to go to be healthy, but at least pockets of it are finally gentrifying, something that didn't exist just a few years ago. Plus, the optimism just keeps growing, with a very healthy, strong growing IT cluster DT, and lots of new residential planned.