How many "yuppies" have actually moved to Detroit the past couple of years?

[Bham1982]

A better way of phrasing that is that despite essentially being owned by a slumlord, the building is still managing to get $575. Meanwhile the nearly identical building that has less amenities [[no parking garage) but is properly managed is getting 700-900 for a studio and 900-1200 for a one bedroom.

These are nonsense excuses. $700 for an apartment is absurdly cheap, and whatever building I bring up with vacancies and low rents you'll just say "the landlord is a slumlord", "the location sucks", "there are Sec. 8", "the apartments are ugly" etc. In a thriving city, it wouldn't matter. The character of the landlord would have no bearing on whether apartments sit vacant.

Now, there is a shortage of hard stats about the population, but it's factually known that rental rates have been rapidly increasing, and it's factually known that vacancy rates are very low. There's no question about demand.

There is no evidence for any of this. The Freep articles and Gilbert propaganda machine are useless for actual comparative stats. Downtown landlords know that rents have grown slowly over time, and if you rented 5 years ago, things haven't changed that much. And I can show you the same breathless Freep articles about a downtown "boom" from the 1980's, 1990's and 2000s.

In the 1980's, there was actual new construction highrise towers going up [[Millender Center, Trolley Plaza, Riverfront Apartments, Harbortown, Stroh River, etc.) If that happened today can you imagine the posts on DYes? There would be a ticker-tape parade and people would be claiming Detroit was the next Dubai. And that was the 80's, an era the same people will claim was a time of severe downtown decline.

Riverfront Apartments were built by serious institutional investors through Taubman, and were planned as a mini-city of condos. Can you imagine that happening today, and the resulting reaction? It would be like the Lions winning the Super Bowl. There was a complex east of the RenCen called Port Atwater, that would have resulted in something like 4,000 apartments.

Now people have a parade when an abandoned building is renovated for $900 a month apartments at a taxpayer cost of 150k a unit. What a deal. You could just give every tenant a house and be done with it.