I was born in rural Michigan and lived there until the late 80’s. I’ve not really been back except for a couple of trips to the tricity area, but not for a long time now. I know Detroit is bad, and I know Flint is bad- I was born there and we lived there in the 70’s, which should qualify for some sort of survivor’s pay- it was bad. After that, we lived in the greater metropolitan thumb area- an area of nothing but farms, silos, and high school football. There were certain towns here and there that were kind of dumpy, but for the most part they were decent little middle class well-kept towns.
My friend that still lives in Michigan has been telling me that most of Michigan is now “hicksville”, run down, poor, shithole places.
Really?
I was thinking about moving back there, reasoning that I’d rather live in the woods, by the lake, than in the ghetto, by the crackhouse. Her information does not mesh with the memories I have of the upper portions of the state, including where I grew up.
As a Notre Dame fan, I feel compelled to say “now?”. But if true it would sadden me - I love the state of Michigan. I spent a summer up in Saginaw (not exactly a booming economy), but loved my weekend drives through central Michigan. I don’t think any state in the country nails that small town feel quite the same way.
For years we used to go up to a family property near Twin Lake, and my interactions with locals always impressed me that rural Mich had a surfeit of tattoo parlors and a shortage of dentists. Would be a cheap place to live tho - if you liked fish and venison.
If you’re already rich, Michigan has some beautiful (expensive) places to live. Glen Arbor where my aunt lives is my personal favorite. But if you’re not, then yeah…It’s not looking too hot.
I’d say the UP is better than it was 15-20 years ago.
In the 80s, my little town was in the beginning of making the transition from being industrial to being pretty and more touristy. Now, our lakefront is full of parks and bike trails, there’s several decent restaurants in town, there’s gift shops, and there’s still a nice old fashioned downtown with things like locally owned department stores and candy shops.
Jobs, unfortunately, are as they always have been in the UP - few and far between. If you’re lucky enough to get one, you hold onto it forever. If you happen to be a doctor or other health care professional, you’re lucky, it’s a great place for those kind of jobs. Other professions? Not so lucky. I brought my own job when I moved back because I knew being locked into the local job market would be impossible (I’m a software engineer. The high-tech industry up here is non-existent.)
I love my town, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is outdoorsy in the least, or who just happen to like small towns with character who happen to get a ton of snow in the winter. Bike magazine has declared us one of the best places to mountain bike in the country in more than one issue. We have a great system of cross country ski trails for the winter. We’ve got festivals all year round - sled dog races in the winter, mountain bike races in the summer, art fairs, food fairs, heck last year we even had a Oktoberfest that just about every microbrew place in the state set up a booth at.
Every once in a while, Mr. Athena and I talk about moving, and it always comes down to “where would we go that’s as good as here?” Everyplace we can think of that’s better also has a cost-of-living that’s high as a kite (I’d love to live in Telluride, Colorado for example, but there’s no way I can afford it.)
So no, not all of Michigan sucks. Just the lower half.
And for those of you who think Michigan is ugly, I give you this.
Took those pics last Sunday. The trailhead is about a ten minute drive from town. I’m planning on spending at least a few afternoons on that beach this summer. Chances are we’ll have it entirely to ourselves, and could skinny dip if we wanted.
I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean by “suck.” Is it just, “My friend that still lives in Michigan has been telling me that most of Michigan is now ‘hicksville’, run down, poor, shithole places”?
And what kind of areas are you looking at?
And how much money do you have?
Most parts of Detroit suck. For some reason Dearborn’s always been in high demand, but to me even that sucks. The suburbs all around Mt. Clemens are great, but Mt. Clemens itself sucks, and some of the suburban neighborhoods closest to it suck.
Getting more rural, Port Huron doesn’t suck, but it has sucky parts. Ft. Gratiot doesn’t suck, but parts of it are starting to.
Getting more rural, Columbiaville doesn’t suck, and then the only hicky part of Fostoria is the motorcycle gang club, but that’s actually kind of a neat place to me.
Michigan is still very beautiful in many places. The economy is very bad though, and has been for years before the 2008 crash. I remember the phrase “single state recession” being tossed around when I left in 2004. It is currently rated worst in the nation in unemployment (although the city of Ann Arbor reports lower unemployment than the state as a whole). The problem, in terms of visual blight, is a great deal of abandoned/disintegrating industrial areas and semi-abandoned/underutilized commercial spaces in suburban areas.
I would imagine that the UP, where jobs were never very thick on the ground, and not dependent on the car industry, is actually less affected than most places.
I live in Ann Arbor. It’s pretty nice. I mean, it’s not terrifically thrilling, but there are happening bars and cafes, lots of bookstores, the parks have kids playing in them, people are having dinner at the expensive restaurants on Main St. that I can’t afford, the president is coming to town in a couple weeks and people are excited about that. There’s farmer’s market on Saturday and artisan fair on Sunday, you can get a trillion dollar sandwich at Zingerman’s and there are two different specialty cupcake bakeries downtown.
Is there any hope for Detroit? I can see where it might be exciting and profitable to be there if it does come back as a strong city, but is it possible? Flint never really came back, that I know of.
Bringing back Detroit as a functional (as opposed to dysfunctional) city will take a lot of work and creative thinking. It’s impossible to say one way or another if it’s truly impossible, but it is certainly a serious challenge. One of the biggest problems is that it’s such a large city, geographically. So you have patches of positive neighborhood activity here and there, but they’re often islands in a sea of abandoned houses and now-empty lots. This sort of urban layout is a serious challenge to people trying to create sustained economic growth.
Some people have suggested using all of that space to create urban gardens to resolve Detroit’s chronic food accessibility problems. I personally would be nervous about eating any food grown in Detroit until you can show me some chemical test that show that the ground is not completely covered in chemicals.
FTR, I’m working on my Masters in Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and urban renewal in the US is VERY far from my area of expertise, but I’m always getting invited to different events on improving growth and education and food access, etc., in Detroit. I’ve also been on economic development field trips to Detroit a couple times and met people (in government and private industry) who are working on the issue. A lot of them are Detroit natives who are devoted to their hometown and making it work again. So while I can’t provide a lot of details, I do know that there are a lot of really good people who are trying to make Detroit a great city again.
In my personal opinion, they can do it, too. A friend of mine is starting a new job in Troy in a few months. He’s planning on buying a condo - not in Troy, but in downtown Detroit. I think that’s a pretty sign right there.
Well, for the gardens, you could do raised gardens and not actually use the soil on the ground; I wouldn’t trust it, either.
The problem with the condos downtown is that they’re not near anything other than the downtown entertainment that suburbanites go to as well. I have a few friends who live in them and they always have to drive out to the suburbs for anything like groceries, hardware stores, clothing, etc. What’s the point of living in a downtown if you can’t get to basic stuff like that?
You don’t grow directly in the dirt. You create raised beds and greenhouses. That’s what they do in NYC when they convert an abandoned lot. You can also keep chickens or bees. You can also fish farm on a small scale.
Flint was considering relocating all remaining residents to a smaller geographical area, rehousing them in homes that have reverted to the state by tax liens, and bulldozing the now-uninhabited areas and converting them to public greenspac. Apparently, for example, they would save in the $100,000 range annually if the ONLY savings was in not having to collect garbage on streets with only one resident. Multiply that by snow removal, police/fire/ambulance, maintenance on utilities/light poles, turning off unused streeetlights, etc… it would add up.
I saw a Dateline special on Detroit on Sunday night, and there are over 800 public free gardens in Detroit and surrounding areas, so that’s already well established. Which is good, seeing as there are no fresh fruit or vegetable vendors in the area, just mostly discount grocers with canned goods.
That’s not actually true. There are no chain supermarkets, true, but there are actually a number of places to get fresh fruit and vegetables. They’re mostly small ethnic markets, but not all of them. It is still a big problem, though, because the food is more expensive than it would be in most cities, and yeah, it’s not very widely available.
Hello Again: okay, cool, I didn’t know about that.
They did make it look like there were really no places to get fresh fruits and vegetables, at least in the innercity area. There were even little “ice cream man”-like trucks going around distributing them to the poor.
