Originally Posted by
1953
As I cannot hear this conversation about Detroit, back to Warren.
I have young kids and I am looking for a place on the East Side to put down roots. While Warren has houses, it lacks a lot of the attributes I am looking for. Its houses are very small, and many are out of date. Its neighborhoods lack any semblance of charm; many are merely post-WWII tract housing.
The city has parks, but they don't seem vibrant or interesting to me. It has commerce, but all of those strip malls make me want to gag. It is true that I'm looking for a single family home, but I would appreciate if some part of town near my house had zero-setback, multi-story, mixed-used developments, to give me somewhere more interesting to visit without having to leave the city.
The "downtown" that Warren has built is really just an ugly 1960's civic center, without any of the urban charm of more historic urban places. While my family has a car, I know that my kids and I enjoy walking places and taking alternative forms of transit, if only for the fun of it. Also, we like to go interesting places on weekends - museums, kid-friendly attractions, etc. Maybe Warren has some of these, but I can't think of any in particular.
So, yeah, Warren is probably an ok town, but I can't move my family there [[even though it suits my geographic needs perfectly), because I can't see raising a thriving family there. I want Warren to succeed, so I want them to consider some of these types of developments in the years ahead. A strong inner ring will help Detroit, but a bedroom community of 100,000+ seniors living in small post-WWII bungalows is not the way to get there.
1953