Are Hipsters Reviving Detroit?

If you believe everything you've seen online, then you'd probably think that Detroit is a vast wasteland of ruins overrun with gangs and violence. But is that true?

Sure, Detroit is filled with abandoned buildings, lacking in people, and a bunch of other bad shit – but that’s not all that’s going on. People from our generation are redefining the city in much the same way that the city was built in the first place. Artists, DJs, producers, and other entrepreneurs are rebuilding Detroit from the ground up and Palladium Boots got a sneak peek with help from everyone’s favorite jackass Johnny Knoxville. Detroit Lives [...] is Palladium’s exploration into the current state of things in Detroit.

Cool Material has more: Link [embedded Flash video clip]

Watch the video clip and answer me this: Are hipsters reviving Detroit?

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It will take a hell of a lot more than the artist community and urban faming to revive Detroit to any great extent.

The city's infrastructure is too far gone. It will take billions upon billions to revive Detroit.

Seriously, what can a handful of hipsters accomplish, but create some urban art and draw some attention to the city? I think it's great they're trying, but they don't have the resources to make much of a difference.

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I left Detroit a year ago and don't plan on returning. You can drive from the east side of Detroit all the way over to the west side of Detroit, a city with an area of 143 sq miles and never see a neighborhood that's not run down. I've lived all over that town and most of it looks like a shithole. Many neighborhoods would be perfect locations for urban reforestry. The places that are nice are few and far between and and are generally only a couple of blocks in size.

Cronyism, thug elected officials who manage to get re-elected and a city council filled with members who aren't required to live in the district they represent contribute to the decay. When neighboring counties have to downplay how close they are to Detroit in order to entice businesses to relocate to the area it indicates a huge problem.

Hipster or not

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There's an old journalism saying, "If it bleeds, it leads." That tends too be the case with most coverage of Detroit. Honestly, 1/3 of the city is the burned out crack houses we expect to see, another 1/3 is average and uninteresting and 1/3 can hold it's own against most cities in terms of liveliness, architecture and character. Google street the Palmer Woods or Indian Village areas for some "cleaner" areas of the city. Don't look at the suburbs to see what the city is like.

The artsy music crowd is what I was a part of in the late 80s early 90s so that crowd is nothing new. Basically it was cheap and wide open then too. Old brick warehouses with a loft for dirt cheap. Those areas haven't really grown substantially though (that I know of) and I wouldn't expect any hipster apocalypse there.

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this happens every time: the artists move into cheap, kind of scary neighborhoods, use their creativity to fix them up, the money people who are basicly cowards go,
"Oh, look, I want that for myself", they move back in, real estate, rentals and taxes go up and soon the urban pioneers are displaced.