I wanted to share a link to my latest column about Detroit, linked here:

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_...-recovery.html

I wrote this right about the time there was a flurry of pieces on the web hating on Shinola. It's about the understandable ambivalence Detroiters have towards outside investment, but the need to overcome that and embrace it. Here's an excerpt:

“Detroit is the only town in America where misery hates company, or at least distrusts it,” wrote Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson about the Shinola controversy. Detroiters, he notes, view enterprising newcomers as “mere poseurs, parasites feeding off a hardscrabble heritage to which they lack any legitimate claim.” Some of this is understandable. In a recent study of urban rootedness, Governing magazine found that Detroit had more longtime residents than any other large city surveyed. Those residents who stayed during the decline resent outsiders coming in now and leveraging the city’s ruination for profit. The city’s overwhelmingly black population lends an unavoidable racial dimension to this critique.