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Just read another article about how much the Brighton area is booming. I drove through there this week and there's mile after mile of big new builds. I just don't see anything that proves the sprawl is slowing down, or that families are moving to Detroit. If anything, it just seems the inner-ring suburbs of Detroit are getting as bad as Detroit as the wealth moves further and further away from the city.
Ann Arbor, Brighton, South Lyon, Oakland Township, Oxford, Clarkston, Romeo.
I don't see sprawl slowing down either. What I don't understand is how people can be ok with commuting an hour+ one way to work. That would drive me insane (no pun intended).
Just read another article about how much the Brighton area is booming. I drove through there this week and there's mile after mile of big new builds. I just don't see anything that proves the sprawl is slowing down, or that families are moving to Detroit. If anything, it just seems the inner-ring suburbs of Detroit are getting as bad as Detroit as the wealth moves further and further away from the city.
Ann Arbor, Brighton, South Lyon, Oakland Township, Oxford, Clarkston, Romeo.
Nobody on this forum, or the Detroit News, or Free Press, or Metrotimes, or any of the TV news outlets are claiming that families are moving to Detroit.
I have never stated that sprawl is slowing down. What I have said on this forum is that the population of the Detroit Metro has stayed flat since 1970, yet the same amount of population (about 4.3 million) is occupying about 50% more land area than we did in 1970, and we wonder why we don't have enough money to fix the roads. We don't have enough people to financially support the infrastructure of the city + old sprawl + new sprawl.
I don't see sprawl slowing down either. What I don't understand is how people can be ok with commuting an hour+ one way to work. That would drive me insane (no pun intended).
I don't understand this either but I am guessing many of these people living in Brighton have jobs in Novi area, 30 min drive is average for Metro Detroit.
In my view, Detroit is the main city but we have many well established stand alone cities in Metro Detroit that are a hub on their own & provide jobs/support to the surrounding neighborhood, cities such as Troy, Ann Arbor, Novi to name few. these cities can survive without need from Downtown Detroit & people who work in those cities will live 30 min drive away from that city in any direction. That is not real suburban sprawl to me. The real sprawl is when cities an hour away from any major city expanding.
I believe what we're seeing is that between 2000 and 2010, the population of Metro Detroit shrunk by about 180,000. Between 2010 and 2015 numbers show the metro has grown (though I can't seem to find a solid number on exactly how much, but I would estimate 30,000 in the 5 county area).
That growth has gone partially to inner ring suburbs (Note: towns like Royal Oak, Madison Heights, Ferndale, Berkley, Clawson, Warren, Southfield, Oak Park, Eastpointe, Roseville, St. Clair Shores - they all posted population gains of 1-4% from 2010 to 2015, and this is after each of those towns suffered population losses of 10% or more.); and partially to exurbs like the ones mentioned in posts above. I think it's less the neighborhood aging that makes a city/county undesirable, but more it's when a city becomes poorly managed or when pensions eat up the city's ability to keep itself in good condition.
(Hi Wayne County, I'm talking about you. You need to do away with your pensions. They're completely unsustainable. You have to keep raising taxes and cutting services to sustain them, but this also pushes more people out, requiring you to raise taxes and cut services to sustain them... and so on.)
There will always be people who want to trade two hours of their life each day for planned subdivisions and new homes, but personally that's not really my thing. I value my time more than I value vaulted ceilings and attached garages. I believe this trait of mine is common in your typical millennial home buyer. Of course not all young people value time more than things, but many of us do.
On a positive note, Wayne/Oakland/Macomb Counties lost a combined 181,000 people from 2000-2010, but from 2010-2015 it gained 6,000 people (granted, this is slower than birthrate, but this growth has accelerated in the past few years; plus, at least people have stopped leaving at the alarming rates seen in 2000s, this is still happening in some metros. My point is, the growth in Livingston, Washetnaw, and Lapeer Counties is not only compromised of exurban flight - some of it is natural growth. In addition, the population flight from Detroit itself has dropped from around 10,000 a year around 2010, to less than 3,000 between 2014 and 2015, (and likely less today). Of course these are estimates, but .. it's what we have to go on.
I don't understand this either but I am guessing many of these people living in Brighton have jobs in Novi area, 30 min drive is average for Metro Detroit.
In my view, Detroit is the main city but we have many well established stand alone cities in Metro Detroit that are a hub on their own & provide jobs/support to the surrounding neighborhood, cities such as Troy, Ann Arbor, Novi to name few. these cities can survive without need from Downtown Detroit & people who work in those cities will live 30 min drive away from that city in any direction. That is not real suburban sprawl to me. The real sprawl is when cities an hour away from any major city expanding.
Yes. Magna, Harman and Nissan are just a few large automotive companies located in the western burbs. Lots of these employees live in Novi/Lyon/Brighton.
A lot of people in the far western suburbs have jobs in Ann Arbor as well.
I don't understand this either but I am guessing many of these people living in Brighton have jobs in Novi area, 30 min drive is average for Metro Detroit.
Drive down 23 some morning and you'll see where lots of Brighton/Howell people have their jobs
I have watched this for decades. The masses "discover" a cute small town just outside of the current ring of suburbia. Rural living with a cute homey downtown nearby? Who doesn't want that.? They start moving there in droves. Prices go up, so they want condos. Then they want Starbucks. They move up at work and want subdivisions of ever bigger homes, preferably on a golf course where the woods used to be. They do not want to have to drive 15 miles for a health club so the little grocery becomes a health club. then they need a Kroger or Meijer, then a wall-mart pops up nearby and the little mom N pop places go out of business, or they get replaced with high end places where a hamburger costs $18. Of course you need to have a McDonalds or subway in town for a quick meal. Then of course you need an Auto Zone, some extra banks t finance all that growth, wider roads, more stop lights, more parking lots, maybe a Chucky Cheese . . .
Pretty soon the area is all built out with subdivisions and the quaint little downtown is no longer quaint. Suddenly the next town out catches attention and the whole process begins again.
It is like an unstoppable wave. Framington, Novi, Northville, Lyon Twp.South Lyon, Brighton. After they destroy Brighton and look around and realize that for some puzzling reason it is no longer cute/quaint/appealing - Fowlerville? Milford? In another direction it is out to Saline and Ypsi township. Can it go further? After they finish off Saline and Plymouth, will Tecumseh, Dexter and Chelsea be next? Pinkney?
This process has bee radiating out from Detroit for ages. New freeways and higher speed limits make further and further out places seem practical. When I grew up in Northville/Southlyon, both places were cute, quaint and rural. The biggest store in South Lyon was E & R Saddlery (or Maybe Showermans IGA). At martins hardware, you told them what you wanted, and they went and got it for you. South Lyon now has more strip malls/stores and fast food than quaint remains of he downtown. Martins Hardware is now a typical ACE or ACO hardware strip store where you park out front and browse the aisles. (Sure it is cooler than Home Depot, but it is nowhere near what it was). Northville was absolutely awesome before it got Yuppified. Now it is kind of Meh. Some quaintness/small town remains, but much was torn down and replaced with garbage (some of which is now empty or mostly empty because it never had any appeal beyond being "new". Still Northville is nicer than many places in the area, but a shadow of what it was/could have become.
Maybe it will fizzle in its journey West and just continue radiating North from Detroit instead, There are a lot of quaint places in that direction that have not yet been ruined. It could go south too - Flat Rock, Wyandotte, Gibraltar, even Monroe is probably within range. Huron township is ripe for McMansioning - they have good schools and rural living, lets fill it up with subdivisions because that will make it nicer to live there.
It is a sham,e but there is little point in grousing about it. It is not gong to be changed and apparently cannot be stopped.
My boss commutes from Brighton to downtown every day. She lives on acreage, not in a subdivision. I'm not sure where her husband works, so that could play a part in their decision, but I think it is more the rural community that they wanted.
Commutes are a funny thing. My commute is 65 miles and takes me about 55 minutes. I work with people who live in Oakland, Macomb, and even Wayne county, within a 30 mile radius, and their commutes can be 45 minutes or more. I have a long drive, but it is relatively headache free, with the exception of the 14 mile to 8 mile stretch. And then, when I run errands around home, I have absolutely no traffic. I may spend a little more time during my daily commute, but many of my coworkers deal with heavy traffic with every single errand they run. No thanks.
With weather like today, I start considering moving closer. However, I don't want to go farther from my family, I spend only about half of what rent would be closer to Detroit, and I enjoy having traffic free weekends.
I listen to audiobooks and the time really doesn't bother me. I'm an avid reader and when I started the commute, I was frustrated because I didn't have much free time to read. When I realized how many digital audiobooks my library had, I started listening to them and it is no longer an issue.
Yeah, my commute is mostly a function of my desire to live in Ann Arbor and my need to balance my commute with my girlfriend's (she works in Ypsilanti)... it is a headache free commute and I find myself enjoying the opportunity to have some thinking time to myself, which I rarely get at work or at home. Plus, I can usually get from parking lot to driveway within 35-45 minutes, which compares favorably to many of my coworkers who don't commute the same distance but endure long stretches on surface streets.
I don't think sprawl is slowing, but people's priorities in younger generations seem to be broadly different than they were in the previous generation which might eventually lead to a slowdown in sprawl. I do think there are reasons to believe Detroit will be something of an exception to this trend, though:
A) the suburb vs city divide is much more visceral here than elsewhere and many Millennials in SE Michigan were raised to be hostile to urbanity, meaning that potentially more people here than elsewhere in that demographic long for the acreage of their parents... pointedly, most of my metro Detroit friends at UM not only stayed in Metro Detroit when the rest of our friend group left but are openly hostile to visiting them in places like NYC or San Francisco because they dislike urban environments so much.
B) educated, upwardly mobile types who are more likely to want an urban lifestyle still leave Michigan for Chicago or the coasts in large numbers. There are enough left over for Detroit to be on the upswing in this regard, but there is still a perception among those at MSU and UM that the lifestyles they may want are best found outside the state.
C) Detroit schools are more or less universally bad, there is not the rich school/poor school dynamic you see in some other big cities. That is to say, a young family settling down in a Chicago neighborhood like Edgewater could send their kids to public schools without being impacted by the blight of the Southside whereas the same couple would not want to send their child to public schools in Detroit at all.
So I think sprawl is here to stay in Metro Detroit for the time being.
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