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Pete Bigelow · Are You Afraid of Detroit?
September 7th, 2011
Efforts to revitalize downtown Detroit have been ramped up in recent months.
In July, the city and five of its major employers announced an initiative in which employees would receive cash incentives for relocating to certain city neighborhoods and sprucing up their homes. The plans for “Live Downtown” were modeled after an earlier pilot program that urged others to relocate to the city’s Midtown area.
Downtown Detroit. Photo by David Tansey.
Also in July, The New York Times reported on an influx of “socially aware hipsters” within the city’s borders and a 59 percent increase in college-educated residents under age 35. The migration so great, one resident told The Times, “Believe it or not, there is not enough housing in the greater downtown area for all the young people moving to Detroit.”
Emily Bingham can probably relate.
She’s a writer who moved to Detroit and found excitement in the vibrant city. “The house was gorgeous, the price was right, the neighborhood was charming and yet not gentrified, and the city was anything but boring,” she writes on her Found Michigan blog. “What an interesting place to start the next chapter of my Michigan life.”
And then came The Fear.
After she moved into her place, second-hand stories arrived from friends and strangers alike that recounted crimes committed against residents and stoked her unease. Her own fears, embedded in childhood anxieties that her parents’ generation associated with Detroit, rose to the surface. “I’ve known lots of people like you; people who have, you know … the fear,” a friend said.
Bingham’s experience is not unique. Fear and apprehension has given prospective residents pause and steered away prospective visitors for decades. Have you experienced similar feelings about either living in or visiting Detroit? Do you think those feelings are merely rooted in the city’s reputation or founded in current reality? We’d like to hear from you.
What Bingham’s experience may demonstrate is that, despite renewed reinvention efforts and the best of intentions from new residents like herself, the fear is still something the city’s leaders must still confront and combat.
