Detroit Hack City

[Red Devil]

One of the writers at Techcrunch has put out the call for geeks to ditch SF for the D:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/11/detroit-hack-city/

[Lowell]

I love it. More voices from flooded and over-priced Brooklyn. The saying use to be 'build it and they will come'. It seems now it is 'if it is broken they will come.'

The Detroit aura is glowing and growing. I kind of enjoy how it exasperates many [including some on this board] when just people won't buy into their big-bad-scary Detroit paranoia and come here anyway.

We spent a few days in Detroit during our meet-up and I spoke to quite a few entrepreneurs who are either based in the suburbs there, plan to come back after school, or are thinking of moving into the heart of the city. I can’t tell you how happy it made me to see even a few folks rolling back into town. But they need more.

My exhortation is this: Go there, live there, and repopulate Hack City.
...
That can happen in Detroit, and it can happen now. A friend, on seeing the empty buildings, wrote “Think of all the stuff geeks could do in there.” And he’s right.

I’m not naïve about the costs and problems associated with building a business. I’m not ignorant of the very real possibility that the city could implode in on itself, taking startups with it. What I’m sure of, however, is that if we turn Detroit into Hack City, if we fill up empty floors of derelict office buildings with CNC machines, Shopbots, and designers, we can build a new manufacturing sector in darkest Michigan.