Hmm, retailers are leaving Detroit. Not a surprise but hey we are in a recession.

Retailers in any city need tourists to come to their city and shop. Now, we always need the locals to support the retailers but a major city need tourists to visit the city. When it comes to tourists visiting Detroit, Detroit is like a "X" on a map as a place to avoid. People would visit Chicago before they come to Detroit. Go to Chicago and they have retail all through downtown. They can support it because they have people going downtown to work, to shop, to play plus they have the "ELs" which can people from O'Hare to downtown. Detroit have no setup and trust me travelers know this.

Detroit have three casinos yet the majority of their revenue comes from locals. People aren't going to fly in to Detroit to gamble. Detroit badly needs money from outside the state because suburbanites have no incentive to shop in Detroit when you have mega-malls like Fairlane, Twelve Oaks and Sommerset still in operation.

To sum it up, if retail downtown or in the city period is to survive, Detroit needs to be more like San Francisco and not like......Detroit