Houses in Detroit
Com$tock links to a depressing article about our hometown, Detroit. Well, that’s technically not true for me. I’m from a suburb of Flint called Clio. Flint in itself is a suburb of Detroit, though, so I feel fairly comfortable in calling it my hometown, even though pretty much my entire relationship with the city involved going to concerts and then getting the fuck out of there before I got shot.
The big question is: in this day and age, what with the Internet and all, why aren’t more enterprising youngsters moving there? The cool thing to do in LA and New York is to move to the worst part of town, because apartments are relatively cheap … and by “relatively” I mean not-quite-as-grossly overpriced as everything else in the city. Like, maybe in the worst part of LA you could get a house for $250,000. Compare that to Detroit, where, according to the article, you can get a place for 1/10 of that. Why do I continue to live here?
March 23rd, 2007 at 7:29 am
I also thought, why not buy a nice-sized house (or three) in Detroit if the prices are so low? Surely the kids will flock to places they can afford, and such pioneering hipsters are usually turned on by the grittiness. But then I read the part in the article in which someone bought houses for $70K a few years ago, thinking it was a steal, and now the property is worth half that. Then I started wondering if Detroit might never recover (or at least take many years and a new economic base in order to do so). Sad.
March 23rd, 2007 at 7:45 am
I’ve been wondering about this sort of thing for a while. Why aren’t more depleted rust-belt cities promoting themselves as cheap towns for indigent creative folks? Pittsburgh, Buffalo, half of Ohio, in all these places you can get a nice house for the cost of a good used Volvo. Nevertheless, I continue to live in New York.
March 25th, 2007 at 10:47 am
You still have desperation to be a hipster. Your shoes give it away!
March 25th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Ich bin ein Hipster.