Move Detroit
movedetroit.com56 points by rmason 10 hours ago
56 points by rmason 10 hours ago
As an non-American, looking from the outside, I find Detroit's saga incredibly sad and a little strange.
When I was a kid, Detroit was a symbol of US industry and engineering. All those huge muscle cars. That kind of Mad Max Road Warrior attitude (yeah, I know that's Aussie, but that same attitude).
Now it's a symbol of US decline, I think. It's strange to me that the USA let this happen, or that it didn't have the power to stop it happening.
It would be like the UK allowing Oxford or Cambridge to become a slum, the universities moving away and the old buildings becoming derelict. Or the Sydney Opera House going vacant and letting squatters move in.
There's something very, very symbolic about Detroit, then and now.
Just my opinion. Apologies if it offends, that is not my intent.
I think Detroit is well past its “bottom”. I have visited there every year (briefly) for the past 14yrs and it has some really vibrant and cool aspects now.
My anecdotal evidence is backed up by Detroit Metro real estate outpacing the national average significantly over the past 10 years. The people and culture are great too.
Also if America is ever going to greatly increase manufacturing, Detroit (and the rust belt overall) will be a big player because the navigable waterways have not moved and it is still 10 times cheaper to move things by water than land.
> I think Detroit is well past its “bottom”.
Agreed. My family's from Detroit. Like so many others, they left in the mid-70s because Detroit had become unfathomably bad - the job market was shit, crime and corruption was out of control, and there was no hope for things turning around. In the mid-80s, there were countless jokes about Detroit, like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iFxyAA0l0nU
The UK did do that to large swathes of Northern England. Changing times comes for everyone in the end
Agreed, and I'm sure at one time the UK was seen as an industrial and mining powerhouse and people raised with that image would be sad at the change. But by the time Thatcher trashed the North that wasn't really true any more. I don't think the UK went from an industrial giant to a desolate wasteland in a single generation like Detroit did. I could be wrong, though.
> I don't think the UK went from an industrial giant to a desolate wasteland in a single generation like Detroit did. I could be wrong, though.
Glasgow went from a prosperous shipbuilding town to the heroin capital of Europe. Sheffield also collapsed fairly dramatically with the loss of the steel industry, though maybe it didn't quite fall so far.
> Sheffield also collapsed fairly dramatically with the loss of the steel industry
Nah, Sheffield is supported by their main export — Doctor Who’s companions. :D
Grew up in Sunderland and have spent plenty time in the Rust Belt. Sunderland's worse.
Yeah that's fair point. The closest from that perspective would be the collapse of shipbuilding in places like Sunderland or Hull or maybe textile mills in burnley. But not as significant in terms of global cultural importance i guess
In my opinion you are mostly right. I lived in a Detroit suburb when the city's population dipped below 1M, which was a big deal at the time. 1M was a federal funding floor or something like that so they were literally rounding up homeless people to try and make the cut... unfortunately it didn't work.
I think there is an untold story here about the part that the automobile played in the fall of Detroit. Detroit probably experienced more sprawl than other cities due to the influence of automobiles on the local economy. You only need to drive around Bloomfield Hills for 10 min to know that the metro has plenty of money, but the people who could afford 2 cars weren't staying in the city proper.
On the flip side it was a terribly exciting place to live at that time. Detroit still had excellent music, sports, and entertainment. Unlike the major metros on the coasts, I never knew anyone who had a problem making rent or had to work extra jobs to get by. A double edged sword I suppose.
> It would be like the UK allowing Oxford or Cambridge to become a slum, the universities moving away and the old buildings becoming derelict. Or the Sydney Opera House going vacant and letting squatters move in.
Or the Roman Forum going from the centre of life in the world's most powerful empire to cattle field? [0]
I don't think it would offend, Americans are the first to bemoan what happened to Detroit as far as I have seen. What will probably offend more is the fact that the USA is not really in decline, as much as that has long been the highbrow narrative.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
It has lost ground in some industries, it has also invested and pioneered in high tech design and manufacturing, aerospace, computers, software, internet, etc. which has kept it strong. And I know GDP doesn't give you much picture, but it gives you something.
Australia is doing well too as a coal/LNG depot and iron ore mine for China, after giving up their manufacturing industry and any pretense at technology. The "Education" export sector has looked good on paper, but the penny is beginning to drop that universities have been allowed to be hollowed out and turned into degree mills chasing short-term profit like some wall street quarterly results whore, and when there is very little investment in science and technology in the country, "higher education" can never be at the forefront. I guess that's good, the world will "always" need iron ore, bauxite, uranium, and coal/gas (until it doesn't). But when it runs out or stops being bought, are we going to be any better off than the Saudi post-oil?
Australia has so little of its own capability that if something serious happened to our maritime trade (I'm not talking about the tiny blip in the Persian Gulf just now, but a serious conflict involving real players), they would all starve to death in the dark, surrounded by vast fields of food and energy.
America has its problems, but it always has something on the go there. There's an energy in the air over there. Like China. People are determined to do something, reminds me of stories of the Australia that died before I was born. Australians aspire to work in a mine or in a worthless government bureaucrat jobs they can't get fired from, and accumulate rental properties. "But it's so 'laid back'", "but we don't have gun crime", "we have government healthcare" does not mean the road it is going down is not a dead end.
While I agree with your overall assessment of the Australia economy...
> But when it runs out or stops being bought, are we going to be any better off than the Saudi post-oil?
"It" is not going to run out in the foreseeable future. Australia is unimaginably huge and has deposits of pretty much everything somewhere. The state of Western Australia alone has 29% of the world's known iron ore, more than any other entire country (Brazil is #2 with 19%) and more than Russia and China combined.
It really isn't hard to "foresee" 50-100 years into the future, and that's when iron ore could run out. Could even be sooner if production increases significantly.
Yeah but when they automate all the mining jobs away and the existing policy of bribing our politicians to not tax them gets to its logical conclusion, what's the point? We're just throwing away irreplaceable natural resources.
> they would all starve to death in the dark, surrounded by vast fields of food and energy.
What does this mean? That Australia is self-sufficient in food and energy but exports all of it or does it mean Australia is incapable of processing the raw materials into finished goods?
yeah, basically. We export iron ore and import cars. If the global trade system shut down we'd be sat on a huge pile of ore with absolutely no way of turning it into anything useful.
It's similar with food: our Wheatbelt produces vast amounts of wheat. Which is great but kinda useless without global trade; we can't turn all that wheat into actual food ourselves.
Australia does not have the ability to manufacture enough fuel or fertilizer to feed or harvest or transport its crops and livestock or dig minerals and fossil fuels out of the ground. Is also incapable of making any of the machinery to do any of those things either. All of it has to come on boats.
Australia ships thermal and coking coal and iron ore and bauxite and uranium and lithium to China, Japan, Korea, and buys cars and steel and batteries and machinery back from them. It's not high-tech, smart, forward looking. It extremely extremely lucky (cursed by its luck, really) to have the natural non-renewable resources that it does, and it is hell-bent on squandering them all as fast as possible and having nothing to show for it by the end of it.
In a way it’s nice. You let failing things fail and new things take their place. The problem starts when new things don’t take their place and I hope the current regressive political climate doesn’t get us there.
"Motor City" was basically the "Silicon Valley" of its day with entrepreneurs and companies. Then it got mired by a bunch of businesspeople rent seeking rather than innovating and collapsed.
> When I was a kid, Detroit was a symbol of US industry and engineering. All those huge muscle cars.
Which was precisely the problem at the time. Detroit was producing muscle cars (with terrible engineering other than gigantic engines) and huge land yachts "Because profit!" when gas was going nuts and got demolished when Japanese cars showed up. Sound familiar? Detroit is producing Brodozers "Because profit!" when gas is going nuts and is going to get demolished when BYD finally shows up.
> Now it's a symbol of US decline, I think. It's strange to me that the USA let this happen, or that it didn't have the power to stop it happening.
I can't think of any country that managed the transition away from a manufacturing labor dominated economy. All of them wound up with their large employment manufacturing centers completely hollowed out and left to rot.
The echoes of this neglect reflect into the anger of the electorate we see today.
However, these same people also refuse to embrace working in new fields like renewable energy. They have completely forgotten that even in the 1970s when the auto companies were extremely sclerotic their employees still had to retrain constantly (that was one of the duties of the unions).
Based on the domain, I expected this to be about literally moving Detroit somehow, either figuratively by relocating things or literally by physically moving the land (like Marble Hill but at a much larger scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Hill,_Manhattan)
Detroit is moving southwest along with the rest of the [North American tectonic plate][1]. It's not moving relative to surrounding cities, though.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_plate#Plate_mot...
The Swedish city of Kiruna has been moving for quite some years now. Here they're shown moving the church: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L71HKb8U-Y0
I thought they might be trying to relocate the government, as in annex some unincorporated land nearby, deannex some or all of the current city, and start over.
I'll get asked where I identify as "from" since I've moved around a lot as a kid, and without fail I'll respond 'Detroit'.
There's so much history and culture to explore; along with tons of huge parks.
If I had to leave Tokyo, would definitely be up there.
If I read the fine print correctly, you could receive 15k relocation assistance!
Be really careful about cheap Detroit homes as they can come with a backlog of property taxes.
And occasionally squatters.
$1000 to move to Detroit is an incredible lowball.
I posted on here yesterday they are offering entrepreneurs $15,000 to start a company there. While that might not be like getting into yCombinator or Techstars its what they can afford to offer. It is a pretty low cost place to build however with a strong entrepreneur culture and some excellent coworking centers such as Bamboo.
Why? It's a fine city to live in, if you can deal with the cold a few months a year.
$1000 doesn’t cover the cost of a moving truck to get your stuff from one end of a small town to the other. In terms of moving costs to relocate from another state, it’s less than negligible. It wouldn’t influence my decision at all and wouldn’t put Detroit on my list of places to consider. If they want to attract talent and entrepreneurs they need to do better.
It’s $1000 more than any other city is offering. Of have I missed something?
I'll give you $20 to drive across the country to deliver me a pizza. At least it's not nothing right? As if getting a small amount of cash is even in the equation at all. The 99.999% bulk of the deal is uprooting your life to live in Detroit. I wouldn't move 30 minutes away from my home for $1000. It wouldn't even cover the PTO I have to take much less the moving costs.
Many cities are offering more. Evansville, IN is offering 3k cash + other non cash incentives. Other Indiana cities give you up to 12k downpayment assiatance on a house.
That's impressive, and thats a hell of a rebuttal. That site is neat too - sorting by 'Program Value' is eye opening. Some are US$20K.
It is and that’s great. I guess it counts for something if Detroit is already on my list, but it’s not what puts Detroit on my list in the first place. A multi-year break on property taxes or incentives like low rate SBA loans or tax credits to move my business would be more interesting.
$1000 to move ANYWHERE is already a lowball. Much less to a city that consistently ranks among the top 5 most dangerous large US cities by violent crime, has brutal winters, and a blight problem.
I recommend visiting Detroit to update your priors. I first visited in 2000 and it was blighted. I visited again in 2025 and it’s actually nice (downtown Detroit and surroundings). There’s even a Microsoft office there.
One surprising thing is how quickly it got blighted. Felt like just a few years. I wonder why that is
Brutal winters. Hahaha. Meanwhile in Canada.
Detroit is nearly in Canada.
It's further north than a small part of Canada, but Michigan is lake effect central, and the Detroit metro is a heat island. It's not usually that bad during the winter, but it does snow.
I’ve lived in Michigan most of my life. I always hear people talk about lake effect snow, but it doesn’t seem that bad. I shoveled maybe 6 or 7 times this past winter and only bothered to pull out the snow blower one or two times. Even when I lived on the west side of the state, it wasn’t that bad. I only remember one time where is snowed about a foot… the roads were cleared and the rest of the winter was pretty uneventful.
There are some areas up in the UP that are bad, but very few people live there and they know what they’re signing up for.
Meanwhile, the people I know who live in NJ got wrecked by snow repeatedly this year, multiple feet at a time. I don’t recall ever getting anything like that around Detroit.
I live just west of Lake Michigan, and what you described would be a high-snow winter here. The lake effect is real. I grew up in the Cleveland area, and I was surprised how much less snow we get in Wisconsin. Longer, colder winters, though.
I lived in Chicagoland for a few years as well, I didn’t notice much of a difference. I would assume that’s similar to Wisconsin.
Of course, I was in apartments with covered parking and snow removal services the whole time, so I didn’t need to care too much.
I do remember the guys in the Chicago office talking about when they got a foot or so of snow and had to walk to the nearby hotel to spend the night, because it wasn’t safe to drive home. I heard stories like that from people in the Michigan office too, but in my 20 years working I still never ran into it. Just lucky I guess.
Lake effect precipitation effects the entire Midwest, but the temperature moderation predominantly effect the peninsulas. We did get more than a foot on the ground earlier, but it all melted, then froze again, then 70 degrees, now 20... the weather is crazy everywhere.
Go for their Techno: Movement fest is a pilgrimage!
The corruption and city tax are worse than the crime (in nice areas like downtown or midtown.
But really its the city tax. I wonder if you can Delaware your LLC or something to avoid it.
Does it come with a private security detail?
I would want to know exactly where I was, but downtown Detroit is like other big city places.
Not needed! All that hyperbole around Detroit is way overblown.
I can second that. I spend a lot of time in Detroit and its suburbs (though don't live there) and have yet to feel unsafe despite dire warnings from all kinds of people. There are definitely areas to avoid, but that is equally true of New York City or San Francisco.
> There are definitely areas to avoid
Not even areas really, just activities. Don't get involved in gangs or drugs and you'll never have any problem. One nice thing about the Motor City is that sidewalks are empty, because if you had any money you would be driving. I've walked and biked all around the city and metro, you're more likely to be hurt by a pothole on a street with no lights than by muggers or whatever people are afraid of.
I'm not trying to be snarky here, I'm genuinely considering moving north, and am curious:
> "sidewalks are empty, because if you had any money you would be driving."
Not sure this makes me feel safer. I'm guessing you're not suggesting that everyone has money, so why are the sidewalks empty exactly?
Also would you say that Detroit is "walkable"?
It's humid and muggy in the warm months and windy/rainy/snowy/cold otherwise. You have to be climatically adapted and motivated to walk around outside most of the year. Plus, car culture is a big thing ("Motor City") so everybody drives and there's next to no funding for public transit. There are sidewalks, there are walking and biking paths that cover a surprising area, but the number of things in walkable distance is very location-dependent.
The weather needs to be your biggest consideration. Cars get eaten alive by salt and you'll need one for sure. It's cold 6 months a year and in the winter you get like 8 hours of sunlight, while you're at work. If you are used to warmer climates you'll probably hate it. It is cheap though, if money is your thing.
Detroit is not walkable, no. Certain neighborhoods sure but they are interspersed. You will want a vehicle.
Techbros will move to downtown or mid town near Wayne State University. Its fine.
But the city tax? Oof
Say Nice Things About Detroit.
I love Detroit. A city overflowing with history and character. The thing that struck me the most about Detroit was the pride. The people who live there love their city in a way I have not seen elsewhere. I encourage everyone to visit. It was nothing like what I expected.
My roots are firmly planted in Seattle now but just a few years ago I was seriously considering a move. If I ever left here Detroit is high on my list.
$1,000? They can't be serious?
Can we add the word "to" to the title?
Or how about "program to incent people to move to Detroit"
do they mean move "to" detroit...?
So an average of about $1600 to move to a place with a historically corrupt and incompetent local government, high crime, poor schools, dated infrastructure, and limited higher education access?
They'd need to add at least 2 zeroes to the end of that number to have any impact.
> limited higher education access
Michigan has some of the best universities in the country, dunno what you’re talking about. University of Michigan is 45 minutes away and it’s ranked #23 in the world according to https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
UM supplied a hell of a lot of Apple’s engineering talent. Tom Knoll (author of Photoshop) went there. I think his brother (used to run ILM) went there, as well.
I really enjoyed MacHack.
Yes UM is a good school, but it's not in the city. It's one of the many reasons the suburbs or Ann Arbor itself are much more appealing.
And that's one world class university in the entire region. Compare that to Boston, SF, LA, DC, Chicago, Pittsburgh and others.
I mean if you’re going to say the university has to be literally within city limits, then I don’t see how Boston counts either (Harvard and MIT are in Cambridge) or SF (Stanford is a longer drive than Ann Arbor is from Detroit), or LA (UCLA is a nightmare of a drive from downtown). Are we really going to split hairs and say Ann Arbor doesn’t count as nearby Detroit but Stanford counts as nearby SF? Come on.
The Detroit metropolitan area includes Ann Arbor, it’s in the same commute range. Yes if your main goal is to attend a university, you should live closer than the nearby metropolis, regardless of which university you choose. It doesn’t mean Detroit has “limited higher education access”.
And there’s plenty of other quality universities nearby. Michigan has a lot of faults but lack of quality universities isn’t one of them. Unless your standards are “it’s not Stanford or Harvard”, in which case you’re just being unreasonable.
I didn't say it has to be within city limits, though I would say access is a selling point. Cambridge is a couple miles from Boston proper and they are tightly integrated, plus BU, BC, and Tufts are in the city. CMU and Pitt are in Pittsburgh. Penn is in Philly (which I didn't list originally), along with other good but less prestigious schools, some excellent schools in the inner suburbs, and Princeton is just as far away as Ann Arbor. NY has NYU, Columbia, plus others nearby. Georgetown is in DC and UMD is a couple miles over the border and accessible via metro. Chicago has UChicago in the city and Northwestern close by.
LA has USC, CalTech, and UCLA within a closer distance than UM, and SF has Cal nearby and Stanford further out. If you want to count UM for Detroit, you have to count all of those schools for their respective cities.
Detroit is not as strong as any of these cities or metro areas with regard to higher education. You can get as defensive and incredulous as you want, but no reasonable person is going to argue otherwise. The fact that UM is 45 miles away isn't going to make a lot of people choose to live in Detroit proper.
> Detroit is not as strong as any of these cities or metro areas with regard to higher education
That wasn’t your first claim, you’ve moved the goalposts. You claimed Detroit has “limited access to higher education”. I never meant to imply Detroit is as good as Boston or SF or the other cities you mentioned, only to point out how ridiculous it is to claim that Detroit doesn’t have some very high quality universities nearby. I didn’t get into Wayne State, MSU, Michigan Tech, Lawrence Tech, UofM Dearborn, or Kettering either, but there are plenty of mid-to-high tier universities close by. “Limited access to higher education” is a flatly ridiculous claim.
I'm not moving the goalposts. I said Detroit has limited access to higher education. I said that because schools like Wayne State, Detroit Mercy, etc. are not noteworthy and the closest "good" school (UM) is 45 miles away. None of those facts have changed.
You're the one trying to poke random holes in my claim in what appears to be an attempt to defend Detroit (there are none, because it's based in the objective fact that Detroit has less to offer than many, if not most, other large cities in that area by any metric), and now are saying I'm moving the goalposts when I address your generally inaccurate statements.
To be clear, both the city of Detroit and its metro area offer less access to quality higher education than many other major cities in the US. It is limited in that regard, especially since this program isn't trying to entice people to move to the general metro area. It wants people to move to the city.
It’s still in-state, which means in-state tuition if your kid wants to go there. It is also close enough to act as a feeder school for a business being started in Detroit. Plenty of graduates from U of M would move to Detroit or its suburbs for work. There is also an express bus route from Ann Arbor to Detroit for those who want to commute.
Also remember that plenty of people went on to do great things without “world class” degree. I know people who went to UofM who MC pub trivia for a living, and I know people who went to smaller public universities in Michigan and are multimillionaires. The name on the paper only takes you so far.
the future is already in Detroit, and it's been there for a while. It's getting distributed to the rest of the U.S now. It might be that going through the collapse to the other side is the quickest way forward, if so Detroit is already further along than the rest.
although it may also be that I am just a cynic.
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