Quote Originally Posted by Detroitnerd View Post
This thread is funny. It's all like, "I WOULD move into Detroit if the police were better, but, like, too bad your police suck, because I'll be paying my taxes to the city where the police work. Like, get your act together, Detroit, if you ever hope to be a success like us."

Why so funny?

First, I'm willing to bet my modest fortunes that you are never, ever going to move to Detroit anyway. Dangling provisos like that before Detroit is silly. You are in the suburbs because you like them and belong there and that's fine. Knock it off and be realistic.

Second: Detroit doesn't need to attract you as a resident. It needs to attract people who value cities in the first place, and they come from all over the world and may set down here, but they notice that it's such a divided region where the city is beset by redlining, a concentration of social ills, lots of low-income people, crime, and more, and that pretty much everybody who's not in Detroit is comfortable to keep those problems away from them, in the city. So they look at the region and say, "Why would I choose a big city where the whole region uses it as their toilet? Why not go to Berlin or New York or San Francisco or San Jose where the region understands that a city is an economic driver?" So, yeah, that's pretty funny.

Finally: Speaking nationally and globally, nobody chooses to move to a place anymore based on police or fire coverage. They might choose NOT to move there based on LACK of those things, but nobody says, "Gosh, Emily, the police and fire coverage in Sterling Heights is AMAZING! We should pack up the fam and move the 560 miles THERE!" The truth is, a lot of suburbanites enjoy Detroit's shortcomings because it makes them feel better about the, frankly, totally uncosmopolitan place they live in. Bigger houses, wider roads, more powerful trucks! But no new museums. No exciting performance spaces. No edgy artists. No world-class opera. A real lack of history. A paucity of historic architecture. Whatever Detroit's shortcomings, most of suburban Detroit is regarded as lacking culture, a sort of checkerboard of malls, factories and aging subdivisions strung together with gas stations and power centers. And that's OK if you want to be a bedroom community for a city, but it's not going to draw any significant cohort of people to live there. So, yeah, that's kinda funny too.

Anyway, in Hamtramck, my police response time is about five minutes. Fire too. We ought to have such excellent response times. It eats up more than half the city's budget.
Great post DN. True on all points.

How about it Gpwrangler?

Hamtramck has great policing. Response times are great [[2 sq. mile city), as I have found when I lived there as well. Gonna move to Hamtown?