Tt proposed post jun 12, 2017 - b

"Detroit and Cleveland are perfect examples-Cleveland is well into it's second life and Detroit, well, that population figure is about to change, you can't get an apartment downtown and cranes are everywhere."

Right. Downtown.

Downtown Detroit, Cleveland, and Toledo are fine places to visit and live.

But someday, people outside these cities will realize that those downtown areas do not represent the entirety of those cities.

Everyday, I make too many quick visits to Hacker News. Most of the tech-related threads are interesting, and sometimes so are the non-tech threads. Here's a May 2017 HN thread that pointed to a Detroit News story about redevelopment of the old Packard Plant. Here are excerpts from some comments in the HN thread:

I grew up in metro Detroit, live nearby in A2, and commute to Detroit proper weekly for meetings. A lot of the people moving to Detroit are like me -- young, unmarried, working in creative, marketing or tech. We are able to have a lot of fun living there.

But relatively few of us stay as we age and get married and build families, for fairly sound reasons, like poor quality of schools and poor quality of emergency services. I worry that we are building a place to be partied but not really lived in.

Another HN comment:

I lived in Midtown for ~5 years in 2010. I've heard it described by disillusioned longtime residents as "two cities" at once -- there's the flashy Greater Downtown developments that suburban outsiders and young transplants take advantage of -- the million and one microbreweries, the great dive bars and concerts, the locally grown organic handmade (artisan shop|bakery|barbershop|restaurants), the low (if rising) rents, the incredible art museums, etc. There's brands like Shinola that completely base their marketing off the image of an "authentic", scrappy city fighting back, even.

But the actual longterm residents, especially the ones living in the vast majority of the city that falls outside of the Greater Downtown area, still have to deal with trying to commute with DDOT, the abysmal public infrastructure, and the horrifically underfunded public school system, etc, and those multifaceted and crippling issues don't see the same kind of widespread attention/praise/improvements because there's no sexiness there and no short term money to be made off of it. And no easy answers, either, it's not as simple trying to fix public transportation in the city as it is opening a coffee house on Palmer.

I don't think it's as simple as whether or not the city is coming "back"--there's a lot of layers to that. "Back" by what definition, and for who?

Another HN comment:

I grew up in Detroit and get back at least monthly. For the past five years all I've been hearing is that all the money is going into downtown and nothing is happening in the neighborhoods.

Well now things are beginning to happen in the neighborhoods. Huge amount of activity in Midtown (Cass corridor) with the new Red Wings/Pistons arena and the entertainment district being built around it. Lots of buildings also going up on Wayne State campus.

Now lots of buildings are also getting restored in the New Center area. The neighborhood around Marygrove College is being rebuilt. There's also a development of a neighborhood being re-imagined on 7 mile.

It took over forty years to decline and now people want it all rebuilt in less than ten years.