Detroit's World City Status Upgraded

**Gistok** · September-23-11, 09:13 AM

Originally Posted by Steve bennet

And Austin. I'm sure people in Austin wish they lived in Detroit.

I always thought of Austin as "Lansing on steroids"... with a few tractor pulls... and Willie Nelson as their patron saint... I guess as with Detroit.... generalizations can be misleading...

**iheartthed** · September-23-11, 09:53 AM

Originally Posted by p1acebo

Chicago is definitely more expensive than Metro Detroit, I don't know where you were living in Michigan so I don't know if it's comparable. However, I have several friends that live in Chicago and I myself have looked at a few places and compared to something equivalent in metro Detroit, Chicago was more expensive. Now, compared to LA, Miami, New York, I bet Chicago has great deals with comparable places.

City of Chicago vs. Metro Detroit? Just curious, what in Metro Detroit is comparable to the city of Chicago?

**Islandman** · September-23-11, 10:15 AM

Originally Posted by iheartthed

City of Chicago vs. Metro Detroit? Just curious, what in Metro Detroit is comparable to the city of Chicago?

These type of questions are irrelevant [[sarcasm). Quality of life in a large city is usually expensive, so I think that saying a city is more expensive to live in [[when compared to Detroit) is hiding your head in the sand.

Astronomical insurance rates and property taxes for no services or quality of life don't count.

**Detroitnerd** · September-23-11, 10:20 AM

Originally Posted by iheartthed

This list is basically just a measure of how much a city resembles London. But the rankings look a bit different for a number of cities from last year, which calls into question the criteria that they use to measure a city. Over the past year, what has changed about Detroit in relation to the rest of the world to move it up by three tiers?

Three works by Banksy...

**Gistok** · September-23-11, 11:13 AM

I can't believe we're having these same old arguments... over nothing more than an arbitrary "list"!

But here's my take on Chicago vs. Detroit... I live in metro Detroit [[SCS)... for me life is much better here in metro Detroit than it would be in metro Chicago. Now granted I'm talking from my perspective only... life in an inner ring suburb.....

1) I don't like mass transit.
2) Lower housing prices.
3) Going downtown won't break the bank for me for parking. In Chicago it's like having a "game" day every day, parking fees wise. In Detroit only on "game" days is the cost for parking outrageous... and if you know your way around downtown [[and use the PM), it's still not so bad.
4) we have the same world class culture that Chicago does... museums, theatre, sports, symphony, opera.
5) first rate hospitals and universities.
6) we NEVER have to pay to use a toll road.
7) it takes less than an hour to get into and out of the city [[and all the way home) during rush hour.
8) Shopping/restaurants/bars? Not a problem.
9) Police/EMS/Fire... not a problem, 5 minutes or less, and I take solace in knowing that if I ever needed an ambulance during rush hour... it won't be stuck in high volume traffic on the way to the hospital.

Any other quality of life issues? Not for me...

bartock · September-23-11, 11:24 AM

Originally Posted by iheartthed

City of Chicago vs. Metro Detroit? Just curious, what in Metro Detroit is comparable to the city of Chicago?

They both have roughly the same number of Detroiters living in them.

**Islandman** · September-23-11, 11:49 AM

Originally Posted by Gistok

I can't believe we're having these same old arguments... over nothing more than an arbitrary "list"!

But here's my take on Chicago vs. Detroit... I live in metro Detroit [[SCS)... for me life is much better here in metro Detroit than it would be in metro Chicago. Now granted I'm talking from my perspective only... life in an inner ring suburb.....

1) I don't like mass transit.
2) Lower housing prices.
3) Going downtown won't break the bank for me for parking. In Chicago it's like having a "game" day every day, parking fees wise. In Detroit only on "game" days is the cost for parking outrageous... and if you know your way around downtown [[and use the PM), it's still not so bad.
4) we have the same world class culture that Chicago does... museums, theatre, sports, symphony, opera.
5) first rate hospitals and universities.
6) we NEVER have to pay to use a toll road.
7) it takes less than an hour to get into and out of the city [[and all the way home) during rush hour.
8) Shopping/restaurants/bars? Not a problem.
9) Police/EMS/Fire... not a problem, 5 minutes or less, and I take solace in knowing that if I ever needed an ambulance during rush hour... it won't be stuck in high volume traffic on the way to the hospital.

Any other quality of life issues? Not for me...

So why do you dislike mass transit and where have you experienced it that left you with that dislike?

**iheartthed** · September-23-11, 12:08 PM

Originally Posted by Gistok

I can't believe we're having these same old arguments... over nothing more than an arbitrary "list"!

But here's my take on Chicago vs. Detroit... I live in metro Detroit [[SCS)... for me life is much better here in metro Detroit than it would be in metro Chicago. Now granted I'm talking from my perspective only... life in an inner ring suburb.....

1) I don't like mass transit.
2) Lower housing prices.
3) Going downtown won't break the bank for me for parking. In Chicago it's like having a "game" day every day, parking fees wise. In Detroit only on "game" days is the cost for parking outrageous... and if you know your way around downtown [[and use the PM), it's still not so bad.
4) we have the same world class culture that Chicago does... museums, theatre, sports, symphony, opera.
5) first rate hospitals and universities.
6) we NEVER have to pay to use a toll road.
7) it takes less than an hour to get into and out of the city [[and all the way home) during rush hour.
8) Shopping/restaurants/bars? Not a problem.
9) Police/EMS/Fire... not a problem, 5 minutes or less, and I take solace in knowing that if I ever needed an ambulance during rush hour... it won't be stuck in high volume traffic on the way to the hospital.

Any other quality of life issues? Not for me...

Sorry, I didn't mean for my question to start a city versus city discussion. Detroit and Chicago do have a lot of aesthetic similarities, but in terms of lifestyle options the two cities are far apart. The lifestyle options that Chicago offers usually comes with a higher price tag attached for things like rent, but the tradeoff is that other essentials to quality-of-life are cheaper, such as transportation. In Detroit, since transportation is inherently expensive, rent has to be cheap[[er).

So I asked the question that I did because I suspect it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. I highly doubt that a place in Chicago, where transportation is expensive, deviates in price that much from a similar area of Metro Detroit where transportation is also expensive. Since there really are no areas of Metro Detroit where transportation is cheap, you can't really make a fair comparison the other way around. Places in Chicago that come with larger price tags aren't just more expensive because they have a Chicago address. There do exist some dirt cheap areas of Chicago -- that are even cheap by Metro Detroit standards -- and they are dirt cheap for a reason.

To illustrate my point, think of a neighborhood in Boston where transportation is cheap. It probably doesn't deviate much in price from a neighborhood in New York where transportation is also cheap. The Boston neighborhood probably deviates less in price from the New York neighborhood than it does from another Boston neighborhood where transportation is expensive.

**Gistok** · September-23-11, 02:31 PM

Originally Posted by Islandman

So why do you dislike mass transit and where have you experienced it that left you with that dislike?

That was a bad choice of words... I probably should have said "I prefer to use my car"... and that's talking strictly about metro Detroit. I'm not at all against mass transit, and hope to see it in my lifetime here in Detroit.

And where have I used mass transit? Boston, Washington, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Nuremberg... loved every one of them.

**Jason** · September-23-11, 03:09 PM

I think the Chicago vs. Detroit stuff is for a different thread.

I also think that this list is more important than those random lists in magazines. I don't know if [[or how) anyone uses this list for business decisions and things like that, but this is one of the go-to lists that people use for ranking cities.

Some of the rankings don't seem right to me though. Dublin and Manchester are higher than Detroit?

Steve bennet · September-23-11, 03:11 PM

Originally Posted by cramerro

.. Detroit is more important than Austin and Pittsburgh.

Detroit city proper, or the entire metro region?

I've been to Pittsburgh, their downtown and overall city is far more vibrant and less shitty than Detroit.

**Islandman** · September-23-11, 03:39 PM

Originally Posted by Gistok

That was a bad choice of words... I probably should have said "I prefer to use my car"... and that's talking strictly about metro Detroit. I'm not at all against mass transit, and hope to see it in my lifetime here in Detroit.

And where have I used mass transit? Boston, Washington, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Nuremberg... loved every one of them.

Gotcha. Thanks for the explanation.

**Patrick** · September-23-11, 05:27 PM

Seems to me that this list is nothing more than a brainfart from the Skyscrapercity armchair general types.

**Jason** · September-23-11, 05:55 PM

Originally Posted by Patrick

Seems to me that this list is nothing more than a brainfart from the Skyscrapercity armchair general types.

This isn't a random magazine list or a random forum list, this list is more meaningful, and it's a lot more well known, and referenced. This list is actually meaningful in some way.

**Patrick** · September-23-11, 06:05 PM

Originally Posted by Jason

This isn't a random magazine list or a random forum list, this list is more meaningful, and it's a lot more well known, and referenced. This list is actually meaningful in some way.

Sounds like it was made for stroking egos

**louis** · September-23-11, 06:22 PM

i agree with corktownyuppie, Detroit is a city on the rise a steep steep rise and has a-lot of room to grow, unlike citys like pittsburg which is in a better shape than detroit but has no where to go from there

**Gistok** · September-23-11, 06:23 PM

Originally Posted by Patrick

Sounds like it was made for stroking egos

Patrick... I'm with you on this one.... I decided to look up the Globalization and World Cities... it mentions Loughborough University in the UK.

Funny that I spent 3 summer semesters at Oxford University in the early 1990s, and I had never even heard of Loughborough University?? So after some Googling... I found out it is in northern "RURAL" England in Leicestershire... one red flag just went up...

This "university" bills itself as "leading the way in sustainability"... OK another red flag just went up.... check it out some more...

OK... they say they're experts on "global warming"... and "alternative fuel sources"... such as wind farms, solar energy...etc.

OK... so now we're getting a picture of this "Global World Cities".... from some Pudunk university out in the sticks of England...

This list was made by some middling professors at a 3rd tier university... so I am now taking the list with a "grain of salt"...

Amsterdam is Alpha and Berlin and Rome Beta.... yeah... maybe on another planet...

The only people who likely feel this list is important... are the folks at Loughborough University!

.... and maybe some Environmentalists.... although I am not disparaging the later group... I'm on the fence about global warming... but not closed minded.

**English** · September-23-11, 07:20 PM

Originally Posted by bartock

They both have roughly the same number of Detroiters living in them.

LOL! Good one... and oh, so true!

I love Chicago. I'd live there. But Gistok is right. Toll roads suck.

**urbanhat** · September-24-11, 05:47 PM

Originally Posted by Gistok

Patrick... I'm with you on this one.... I decided to look up the Globalization and World Cities... it mentions Loughborough University in the UK.

Funny that I spent 3 summer semesters at Oxford University in the early 1990s, and I had never even heard of Loughborough University?? So after some Googling... I found out it is in northern "RURAL" England in Leicestershire... one red flag just went up...

This "university" bills itself as "leading the way in sustainability"... OK another red flag just went up.... check it out some more...

OK... they say they're experts on "global warming"... and "alternative fuel sources"... such as wind farms, solar energy...etc.

OK... so now we're getting a picture of this "Global World Cities".... from some Pudunk university out in the sticks of England...

This list was made by some middling professors at a 3rd tier university... so I am now taking the list with a "grain of salt"...

Amsterdam is Alpha and Berlin and Rome Beta.... yeah... maybe on another planet...

The only people who likely feel this list is important... are the folks at Loughborough University!

.... and maybe some Environmentalists.... although I am not disparaging the later group... I'm on the fence about global warming... but not closed minded.

True, the people who did the grunt work in running the data for these rankings are from this tiny Loughbourough place. But actually the people who came up with the concept of world city and the original idea for rankings are very well respected sociologists-- Saskia Sassen [[now at Columbia), Manuel Castells [[now at USC, previously Berkeley), and others like Jon Beaverstock, Kathy Pain, etc.

Now, how useful the rankings are outside of esoteric sociology academia is another question. But they must be at least interesting or we wouldn't be discussing it so much.

Steve bennet · September-24-11, 06:29 PM

Originally Posted by louis

i agree with corktownyuppie, Detroit is a city on the rise a steep steep rise and has a-lot of room to grow, unlike citys like pittsburg which is in a better shape than detroit but has no where to go from there

Certain isolated areas may be improving, but Detroit is not a city on the rise. If it were, it wouldn't be losing population at a consistent rate.

**wolverine** · September-25-11, 01:03 AM

Originally Posted by noise

The $100 I just paid to park my car for 3 days was a little unpleasant, as well.

Most people who live here will never pay that. Or they'll just park for free. There is free street parking not far from Michigan ave

**fryar** · September-25-11, 05:49 AM

Knee-jerk-wise, I would say Detroit's "cachet" has risen over the past few years. Not ridiculously high and from a pretty low "starting" point, mind you, but it has risen. Now these guys may have some objective criteria, like airport use, and we can debate how relevant they are, but that's how I take these lists, what I think they try to measure. Does it have "cachet," if you set a show there, will people watch it because of how great or glamorous or what-have-you that place, apparently, is?

**louis** · September-25-11, 05:25 PM

Originally Posted by Steve bennet

Certain isolated areas may be improving, but Detroit is not a city on the rise. If it were, it wouldn't be losing population at a consistent rate.

its the areas around the isolated areas [[which have doubled in population over the last 10 years) that will build up next, and that next is what gives the city potential

**313WX** · September-25-11, 05:36 PM

Originally Posted by louis

its the areas around the isolated areas [[which have doubled in population over the last 10 years) that will build up next, and that next is what gives the city potential

Question is will it happen fast enough before those areas around the isolated areas fall too far over the wayside in order to be built back up?

**xD_Brklyn** · September-25-11, 06:05 PM

Seems to me that this list isn't about Detroit per se but about the economic importance of Detroit and its effect on this country and other parts of the world. Glad to see someone recognize the region's importance. Five years ago, there was plenty of commentary out here and nationally belittling the US auto industry.