Sure, can’t anyone? It appears that the entire downtown is practically abandoned. The shear number of empty wasting structures along with comments by other posters, gives a nice post-apocalyptic hellhole impression.
Yes, there are. Nice neighborhoods, nice entertainment and social venues, all the stuff that doesn’t make the news.
Probably not. Despite what **World Eater ** seems to think, you cannot get the true measure of a place from a set of pictures, or a set of impressions. Millions of people live in the Detroit area, and hundreds of thousands go into the city proper to be entertained, to celebrate, to congregate, in short to do all the things people do in other big cities.
Like other big cities, it has its problems. I am certain I could present selected bits of Brooklyn to folks, and convince them that *it * has no redeeming features at all. But it would be stupid for me to form an opinion of a place from just one set of information, wouldn’t it?
Well, it is certainly true that one can leap to conclusions on limited (and carefully edited) images. Based on your criteria, I can make any major city in the U.S. look like a hell hole. Pick any “good” city in the U.S. and I can find selected images that show nothing but desolation and abandonment.
Alright, make Palo Alto look like a hell-hole.
Well, thank you very much for your opinion. Were you attempting to be insulting, or was that completely accidental? I happen to live just about in the geographic center of Detroit (about three blocks from where the '67 riots started, actually). My neighbors are a mix: retirees, city workers, teachers, small business owners, etc. Now perhaps the people you work with really are “ignorant and small-minded” and “don’t seem to know that there are ways to live other than on welfare or preying on others,” but I resent the implication that the negative characteristics you’ve observed somehow represent those of us who live in Detroit any more than they represent any group of people that live in any particular place.
Now I’m not making any Pollyannaish claims that Detroit is a wonderful, trouble-free place to live. Abandoned buildings? Yep, got problems there. Schools? Issues there. Unemployment? Crime? Lack of a truly vibrant downtown? Sketchy neighborhoods? Oh yeah. But to conclude that the whole city is a hellhole (and here I’m looking at you, World Eater, and you, Miller) is also pretty unrealistic.
I love our house and our neighborhood. I sit on our front porch and read all the time. I bike around the city (and, I should point out, being white, I stand out in a lot of places) and don’t really feel unsafe in most places. We go eat in Mexicantown, or Greektown, or around Midtown all the time. I just went to a free concert last weekend (tip o’ the hat to vl_mungo) and had a blast. So I live in a hellhole?
All of which, I just realized, circles around without really addressing the OP. So: Is Detroit messed up? It suffers in comparison to, say, Chicago, that’s for sure. The reasons why probably merit a thread all on its own. I’m unsurprised that “most of the people [you’ve] talked to from the area seem to feel Detroit is a horrible city.” I’ve met more than one person who has simply listened to the worst news out of Detroit, or heard about the worst people living there, or seen the worst areas of the city, and somehow thinks that those events or people or areas are indicitive of the city as a whole. More than one person in this very thread, in fact.
Well, they’re wrong.
As for the “nice features” of the city, it depends on what you’re interested in. Historic neighborhoods? Art? Culture? Music? Nightlife? Restaurants? Something else? I think. to answer your last question, that once you get to know Detroit better, you’ll see it not as a hellhole, but as a city that has a lot of problems, but also a lot of opportunities and potential.
Ok, what other cities can be mistaken for a post apocalyptic warzone? I can’t think of any other US city that has the magnitude of ruin that Detroit has, and that’s what sets it apart. Sure there are some places in Brooklyn (East NY comes to mind), that have some empty blocks and some burned out tenements, but nothing remotely close to Detroit.
While we’re exploring the darker side of cities, I’d like to see San Diego the hellhole.
Unless you want a completely skewed view of the city, slanted towards what is most captivating (violence), turn off the local news.
I live in the city of Baltimore, and I HATE what the local news does to this place. They’re like a schizophrenic chamber of commerce. All of the “positive” stories are about something like the “The Cheesecake Factory” moving into downtown and all the rest of the stories are about violence and corruption.
The correlation between my daily life in the city and what I see on the local news about the city is ZERO. ZERO correlation.
You got to realize that people outside the city don’t get it. To be really simple, the city is composed of 3 things: the attractions, the good neighborhoods, the bad neghborhoods.
The people outside the city come in to see the attractions and leave. They hear about the bad neighborhoods on the news, and the good nieghborhoods don’t get any play. That’s fine by me (I’m not expecting some suburbanite to come in and walk around my neighborhood going, “oh this is pretty”), but it’s just a completely distorted view of the city as a whole.
Still, I have no experience with Detroit, maybe it is a 100% hellhole. But if I can draw a parallel, I’d imagine the OP’s concept of it is probably a lot worse than the truth.
Palo Alto, with fewer than 100,000 residents, is not a major city as I specified. It may be nice or culturally or economically significant, but it is not “major.” (And if we joined it to East Palo Alto in an (unsuccessfull) effort to reach 100,000 residents, we could then find a few slum-like neighborhoods.)
And you can tell all that by a few “virtual tours” on the internet? I have been to areas in several rust belt cities that can rival much of Detroit.
(And as an example of the distortion of selected photography, the “Seven Sisters” lamented in the presentation and the Chrysler plant across the street from that power plant have each been replaced by newer, more energy efficient operations. That is the neighborhood that I described earlier where I lived. There is a lot of new housing being built in that neighborhood–a point not mentioned by the “tours.”)
San Diego? In fifteen minutes with Google, I can come up with a few less than complimentary photos.
The city looked rather Detroit-like in this promotional photo for the new ball park.
It seems even San Diego has general trash dumping on the street, periodically,
along with houses not maintained and cars on blocks.
And while none of these photos anctually indict San Diego as a bad place to live, I feel reasonably sure that, if I lived in that region and knew where to point my camera, I could come up with a very dreary view of the city.
I am not challenging the fact that some people do feel Detroit is a hell hole. I challenged your specific claim that a slideshow on an internet page could provide an accurate assessment of the city.
I’m glad someone else started this thread; I was going to ask a similar question myself, based entirely on references made by actors in movies of the Airplane! genre;
Person 1: It’s bad, really bad
Person 2: Worse than Detroit?
Person 1: Well, no…
I fell quite comfortable with my hellhole assessment. I recently had a few friends go up there, and upon return told be it was “seriously post apocalyptic”. Every time I’ve heard the place mentioned, it’s been in a bad light. It has a famous rep for being a hellhole, and upon seeing the pictures I’m confirming it. This wasn’t some crusty building shot from 4 different angles to make the place look worse then it was. This was an honest photo essay of a world renowned place. The sheer amount of structures in decay seems pretty hard to top, so it’s not exactly a case of a nice place portrayed in a bad light. If you’ve seen other places that are just as bad (though I couldn’t imagine the same magnitude, and that’s the point), then they can be hellholes too, there doesn’t have to be a finite amount.
My impression of the place has formed from many (albeit anecdotal) places, and the pictures were just the final nail in the coffin.
I guess I’ll have to go up there and get mugged for myself 
You know, we actually seem to have arrived at a more-or-less consensus.
Wow. I can’t remember that ever actually happening before.
I guess Detroit really is a hellhole.
Ahem. Hello? Before we all go jumping into bed together. . .
I beg to differ. Lived in Detroit and the Detroit area for 30 years.
**Tomndebb ** begs to differ.
easy e seems ambivelant; certainly not on-board.
**Zut ** begs to differ.
**Trunk ** has pointed out the likely source of your “consensus” in selective reporting.
As long as we’re going for facile judgements based on skewed and limited reporting, I’m gonna take a look at the recent front-page picture of the large, peaceful crowd who happily celebrated the Detroit Pistons’ NBA Championship and conclude that Detroit is actually the Happiest Place on Earth.
What is skewed about it? 