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I am curious so as to How Detroit compares to Chicago. Diffrent/Same culture? Is Detroit sprawled out like Chicago? How is the cost of living and economy? I went to A job fair in Chicago a few years ago and noticed people drink beer like its water up there. Is that a Chicago thing or midwest thing?
Not even sure if there is a comparison.
I'd take Cleveland over Detroit these days. It has gotten that bad in Detroit. Although it is coming back, at a snails pace.
Primary issue that Detroit has is the growth seems to be downtown primarily. Not sure if Chicago has that problem.
In reading the first page of post in this thread started in 2010. I found these two very informative post and worth a quote again ....
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tex?Il?
If you were to go back in time, as late as perhaps the '70s, you wouldn't have noticed much difference.
Although Chicago boomed a bit earlier (late 19th century: starting in 1870s) than Detroit (Detroit is over 100 years older than Chicago as a village, but didn't start "booming" until around 1910s), they basically grew up during the industrial era of America so many of the older buildings (built say from 1900-1960) are the same, both cities saw similar immigration patterns due to the attraction of low-skilled labor. (ie: A Polish immigrant looking for work and opportunity wouldn't have seen much difference between Chicago or Detroit in the 1950s). Because of this, the two cities have many historic similarities.
This all changed starting in 1967 (although the roots of the change go back further). Chicago evolved with a more diverisfied economy from the start due to its natural central location in terms of transportation. (Although some Chicago homers like to emphasis the determintation and planners of old. Rebuilding after the fire or reversing the river, is a little mythologized). Chicago was just in a better location. Detroit did not diversify its economy.
In the 1967, some of the worst race riots in history happened. Chicago has some riots altough were not as big as Detroits, and given Chicagos size it affected less of Chicago. Shortly after, by the 1970s, Germany and Japan started rebuilding their industrial base after having been reduced to rubble 25 years earlier, they now had an auto industry that caught up to Americas car industry. Over 30 years of being the sole major automakers in the world, the big 3 car companies got lazy because they didn't have competition.
Chicago also had industry too, that went in decline, because of foreign competition, mostly on the south and west sides. Through a combination of white flight (and later middle class of all colors) and deindustrialization what happened to basically all of Detroit, happened to 2/3 of Chicago. It was the other 1/3 of Chicago (the north side plus Hyde Park; essentially the part of Chicago that is a little bit more like a slice of New York and a touch of Boston (Hyde Park/U of C) essentially "saved Chicago" from becoming Detroit.
So today, you can find vacant land where the used to be factories, houses, and businesses on the south and west sides, but its not anything like what you see in Detroit because
A. The high cost of the north side, is good for the south and west sides, because new building goes on, as the north side is all "gentrified out" and
B. Poor, unskilled residents (many of which don't have a car) can take the El to go serve drinks and food for the masses of upper-middle class downtown workers. Something of which there is less opportunity of in Detroit.
To summarize: the two cities have rather similar historic roots, but things that happened over the last 40 years or so, caused the two cities to go down very different paths.
Comparing Chicago and Detroit can be analagous to comparing Thailand and Myanmar, North Korea and South Korea, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, or the former east and west Germany.
Similar in many ways historically, culturally, but because of differences that go back in the last 60 years, are rather different today.
The effect this has on their respective suburbs is this:
Although there are corporate headquarters, major office complexes in the Detroit suburbs of Oakland County (essentially Detroit version of North Cook/south Lake county or DuPage county) the fact is, in this day in age, where cities have become very popular, and suburbs are considered "meh" the younger generation judges suburbs by the central city.
So, many suburbs that are rather characterless, bland, Anywhere USA have gone in cost of housing and are "hot" for the simple reason they are Chicago suburbs, whereas outside Detroit people just don't care if the fact that Oakland County has the suburban business districts of Soutfield and Troy or the hip downtowns of Royal Oak and Ferndale. The fact that they are part of metro Detroit turns off companies and corporations that are interested in relocating, as well as potentially new residents as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lookout Kid
While Detroit and Chicago did have some similarities in their early 20th Century development, there are some obvious differences that are important to this conversation.
1. Chicago is more of a 19th Century city than Detroit, and to that effect it is more dense. Detroit is a city of single-family or duplex houses on tree-lined streets. The 19th Century core of Chicago is denser and has more brick.
2. Chicago really put a lot of investment into its downtown, even as many neighborhoods were declining in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. A lot of the credit for this should go to Mayor Richard J. Daley. He has been criticized for letting neighborhoods go to pot while concentrating resources on the downtown, but the reality is that the neighborhoods would have declined no matter what due to the changes that ravaged every American city in the automobile age. And because Chicago's downtown remained the major employment and cultural center for the region, the city maintained some level of desirability. Without a vibrant CBD, Chicago's gentrification would not have happened to the extent that it did.
3. In spite of the gritty Democratic machine politics, Chicago has remained a place for business to thrive. While Chicago certainly has blue collar roots, it has always had a larger and more diverse labor pool than detroit--including highly-trained and highly-educated white collar workers.
I'd just add I do see Chicago as a city of tree-lined streets also with standard frontage and alleyways.
I'd take Cleveland over Detroit these days. It has gotten that bad in Detroit. Although it is coming back, at a snails pace.
Primary issue that Detroit has is the growth seems to be downtown primarily. Not sure if Chicago has that problem.
I live in the burbs just outside of Detroit now (after most of my life back in Illinois). I'd take Detroit over Cleveland actually at this point. The region is faring considerably better than it did prior to the recession and prior to the city's post-bankruptcy restructuring. Is there still a lot of work to be done? Yes, of course.
But as far as the core of the city bouncing back, it's a fairly sizable area. Been out here a few years. I'd say Downtown + Midtown + Corktown are immediate pockets of the core of Detroit that have bounced back significantly. But yeah a lot of it is is due to re-investment that caused it to gentrify. A lot of the neighborhoods still require a lot of work. Like some of Chicago's more impoverished areas, people sometimes have to leave the city to get to amenities a lot of us take for granted like quality grocery shopping, jobs, etc.
I live in the burbs just outside of Detroit now (after most of my life back in Illinois). I'd take Detroit over Cleveland actually at this point. The region is faring considerably better than it did prior to the recession and prior to the city's post-bankruptcy restructuring. Is there still a lot of work to be done? Yes, of course.
But as far as the core of the city bouncing back, it's a fairly sizable area. Been out here a few years. I'd say Downtown + Midtown + Corktown are immediate pockets of the core of Detroit that have bounced back significantly. But yeah a lot of it is is due to re-investment that caused it to gentrify. A lot of the neighborhoods still require a lot of work. Like some of Chicago's more impoverished areas, people sometimes have to leave the city to get to amenities a lot of us take for granted like quality grocery shopping, jobs, etc.
It seems like all three cities have neighborhoods that need a lot of work. That seems to be the norm in America these days.
In reading the first page of post in this thread started in 2010. I found these two very informative post and worth a quote again ....
I'd just add I do see Chicago as a city of tree-lined streets also with standard frontage and alleyways.
It definitely is, compared to New York and Philly. Detroit takes it a step further. Detroit seems like a hybrid of Chicago and Los Angeles honestly. LA and Detroit are both 20th century cities like that guy was saying. Detroit trends toward mostly detached housing and it's a completely car-centric metro area, just as Los Angeles was before subways and honestly LA is still mostly car centric. I guess pretty much every city but New York is mostly car centric though.
Reading through the old posts, I like the geographical differences between Detroit and Chicago as framing the differences in life between the two the best. The two cities are probably the most similar two cities in the US, the critical difference being that Chicago is the center of North America, and Detroit is the center of the Great Lakes.
Chicago draws trade from the Great Plains (hence the commodity exchanges), the Lower Mississippi River Valley (hence the barge traffic which permeates Illinois), and the Great Lakes (hence the massive steel/industrial complex on the lower shores of Lake Michigan). Chicago’s hinterland is half of the North American continent, and its birth during the golden age of railroad and industrialization allowed it to horde the continent’s riches before cities like Omaha and Minneapolis could get a foothold. It was really a race between Chicago and St. Louis in the 1850s, but the New York investor class threw their weight behind Chicago and the Erie Canal, so as to prevent New Orleans from becoming the port of choice for outgoing American goods.
Detroit is the node between the Upper Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River Valley, which gave Detroit a geographical pre-industrialization advantage over Chicago in the ease of water-bound transport/trade (hence the reason why Detroit is 100 years older than Chicago), and the city would probably play a much larger role in North America if the Midwest and Upper Canada were under one political entity. The cheap water transport allowed for Detroit’s traditional ship and iron stove manufacturing industries to transform into automotive manufacturing while the nation was industrializing. Detroit was the low-cost middle point between the coal from Appalachia and the iron ranges of Lake Superior, and was already endowed with machinists from other industries. Ironic and possibly ominously foretelling was the growth of the automobile and its de-incentivization of Detroit’s water transport advantage.
From the geography falls the other arguments already stated in this thread. Chicago’s 100 year-boom of buying and selling the resources of North America generated it an enormous amount of wealth, and an entrenched class of people with vested interest in the city’s continued success. Detroit’s 40 year-boom generated wealth faster than Chicago, but it wasn’t to the same magnitude, and it was distributed to workers more generously. Between 1910 and 1950, Detroit was the beacon of the “American Dream” to the rest of the world, and the less desirable “wooden” single family houses of Detroit were built and owned by the workers of Detroit, whereas the laborer living in Chicago’s brick and stone two-flats was more than likely a tenant.
With the urban/industrial crises of the 1960s and 1970s, Chicago had superior human and physical capital compared to Detroit and the results have become self-evident over the past 60 years. The Detroit worker abandoned their “American Dream” home in the city and retired to their cabin in Oakland County, established the entrenched suburban culture of Detroit and the genisis of the "New American Dream". The Daleys and their machine incentivized keeping labors in the city, protecting the investments of Chicago’s entrenched class, keeping the city a city, and enabled the "New New American Dream", which we are now experiencing in all its condo/craft beer/dog park glory. Hopefully all the public sector bribing doesn't bog Chicago into decades of stagnation.
Last edited by michikawa; 09-09-2019 at 04:15 PM..
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That's how you know the city will survive. YAY DETROIT!
