Quote Originally Posted by 48009 View Post
In my other thread, a user posted:



The user is correct, college grads are moving to cities at a high clip. The problem for Detroit is that young people are moving to cities where hundreds of thousands of young college educated people like them already live, with countless bars and restaurants, safe nightlife, elite & competitive workforces, low unemployment rates. Detroit is more or less the complete opposite of all of those attributes. Remove your regional bias and ask yourself this question: why would someone 22-26 yo invest the prime of their life into a city that still requires so much work, when there are major cities just a few hours away that are already turn-key? Unless you don't have the option of working in Chicago, Indianapolis, San Francisco, DC, et al. I'm not sure why you'd sacrifice your prime to live in current Detroit. The perception Detroit is battling: Why would I be some billionaire investors' guinea pig in Detroit? They get rich, while I get to watch my friends on Facebook living it up in established hotspots?
I'm not in that age group [[nor close) but people have a wide variety of preferences. There are a lot of living and working choices available in Detroit at a reasonable cost that don't exist in the same way in other major cities. There are plenty of places to eat and drink and be entertained for anyone who isn't obsessed with those activities. Some people are actually attracted to the idea of helping rebuild the city, and for those people the fact that Detroit is actually in need of rebuilding is a positive, not a negative. And of course if you don't want to rebuild the city no one is going to make you.

That all said, metro Detroit isn't attractive to an awful lot of young people, precisely because the central city isn't what it should be. But it does seem as if the greater downtown area is becoming more attractive, and I think we are moving, slowly, toward a critical mass of population in the next several years, after which attracting more people should be easier. The key metric will be rents reaching the point where unsubsidized [[or at least minimally subsidized) construction is feasible.