I wonder if Dan Gilbert paid for this piece, as I suspect he did for many of the 'Webward Ave' articles that popped up when he bought a bunch of properties on that street.<p>As the opinion of someone who grew up in Michigan and still lives not too far away, tech can't solve the problem. Tech (and tech money) can revitalize downtown, but the problem will have to be shipped somewhere else. It's not just going to go away.<p>Everyone knows what happened in Detroit and Milwaukee and St Louis and other blighted cities, but do people actually stop and think about what <i>really happened?</i> You had a massive amount of low-skilled workers. Millions in these cities. The low-skill jobs went away, and as they did, the workers had no where else to turn. The jobs were gone. As the cities accumulated more homeless and jobless, they got more crime and more tensions. More crime and more tensions means that the owners and managers and skilled labor that was around (mostly white) left the city. This meant more low-skill jobs disappeared, the jobs that were supporting the higher-skilled workers. Grocery stores, gas stations, etc.<p>The buildings aren't all abandoned because no one wants to live there. Some of the buildings are abandoned because no one can afford to have their name legally associated with living there. People still live there, but they don't own the building, they just squat in it.<p>You can't bring in high-skill tech jobs and expect Detroit to be fixed. You can't expect to hire from the local population because there are so many who didn't go to college, didn't finish high school, and are only focused on making ends meet (because so often they can't). You <i>can</i> get a small bump from shipping in higher-skilled workers, as the supporting infrastructure will bring some low-skilled jobs. But it's not enough. It won't revitalize Detroit or Milwaukee or St Louis or a dozen other Rust Belt cities around the country.<p>It'll be very hard for private industry to fix this without pumping a lot of money into it without expectation of making that money back. And if I learned anything in my economics class in college, it's that you can't rely on the private sector to put money into public goods or things with immaterial gains. Even if tech "revitalizes" Detroit, it will look more like San Francisco, with Oakland looming just across the bay. You'll have thousands of skilled workers driving up the price of things and calling it a success, while ignoring crime waves and homelessness because it's not happening in <i>their</i> city. They'll just push the problem to Saginaw or Flint.
The Detroit that existed for most of the 20th Century likely can't exist again in the US unless the whole nation's economy changes. You'll never have a large population of low (formal) skilled workers making good money because their experience and a general shortage of reliable labor. The corporation has figured out for the most part how to move the know-how from the worker's brain to a corporate training manual, and unskilled labor is no longer scarce anywhere for long since relocation is a lot easier than it was 50 years ago. If Detroit is going to turn around, it is going to look like most of the other American cities. Lots of young creatives move in, followed by trendy bars & restaurants, followed by young white collar workers who want to live in the new trendy area. The white collar workers price everyone else out, and the process starts again in a new neighborhood. The white collar workers could come from startups, but the area already has plenty of them working for established businesses like the auto companies. Downtown Detroit at that point would just be a bigger Royal Oak or Ferndale with some high rises and old money sprinkled in.