For most of the colorful characters in Mark Binelli’s gripping, tragicomic account of Detroit, the city’s emptiness is its future, Tom Sugrue writes in a review of Binelli's "Detroit City Is The Place To Be."
Sugrue, who grew up in metro Detroit, is one of the nation's bext known historians. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he is the author of the widely acclaimed "Origins of the Urban Crisis," an account of Detroit's long decline, and other books.
He writes: "(Binelli) spends much of his time with the city’s burgeoning cadre of hipsters—mostly white, mostly young—whose migration set the local news atwitter when the 2008 and 2009 American Community Surveys showed that Detroit’s white population had grown for the first time since the mid-twentieth century. The small upticks in those years, however, scarcely affected overall trends: In 2000, Detroit had almost 100,000 white residents; ten years later the number had fallen to 55,604, or only 7.8 percent of the city’s population.
"Newcomers to Detroit describe the city as “the Wild West” and themselves as “pioneers” staking claim to new land. For them, the Motor City is a tabula rasa, a place to undo, remake, rebuild, reinvent. Among them is wealthy investor John Hantz, who recently won approval for his plan to convert part of Detroit’s East Side urban prairie into a commercial tree farm—a striking turnabout for a neighborhood that was once the city’s densest.
"However small in number, Detroit’s white newcomers are both optimistic and messianic. They see Detroit as the Brooklyn of the prairies or, even more ambitiously, the next Berlin, a magnet for what urban planner Richard Florida calls the “creative class.” For struggling artists, Detroit’s bargain-basement prices are a lure, with single-family homes averaging just $21,000 and vast studios for a tiny fraction of New York rents. The city has become a mecca for Germans who revere the city’s innovative techno music scene. It is now home to several trendy art galleries, including a cutting-edge modern-art museum (MOCAD — the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit). And the hip now have watering holes, many of them retrofitted dives that serve microbrews and local food amid their iconic and now ironic knotty pine paneling, stainless steel bars, and flickering vintage neon signs that have never left the premises. Detroit’s Midtown district — perhaps the city’s hippest enclave (even if all of its residents could fit into a few blocks in Brooklyn) — has even attracted the Holy Grail of a dying Midwestern city: a Whole Foods.
