Quote Originally Posted by m b v View Post
VERY true. But Chicago, NYC and LA/SF are [[homogenized) destinations full like minded educated peers. Detroit could be full of great restaurants, high end condos and everything else that makes Chicago nightlife great, but it will NEVER have the annual deluge of grads from Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill, Urbana-Champaign, Evanston, and on and on. Good luck stopping that snowball. Kids from good colleges want to mingle with other smart good looking kids, not unemployed bridge card users in Detroit.

And seperately, but also related, Detroit will also NEVER have the world class elite universities that bring in tens of thousands of elite students and professionals:

Chicago: U of Chicago, Northwestern, Depaul
NYC: Columbia, NYU on and on
LA: USC, UCLA, Pepperdine
Detroit: Wayne St, Oakland?
More of the same Chicago-boosterism. "Chicago isn't in the Midwest, I swear!".

Of course, you conveniently forget suburban UofM for Detroit, while including suburban Northwestern for Chicago, label little-known DePaul as "elite", and try to group Chicago with [[very different) NYC & SF while trying to separate it from [[very similar) Detroit.

Chicago and Detroit are very similar. Chicago and San Francisco are very different. No rationalizing of DePaul = Stanford, or Northwestern [[in the suburbs) or Chicago [[in the South Side hood) as magically impacting downtown will change this fact. There's a reason Chicagoland is so cheap and the Bay Area is so expensive.