Is Detroit the New New York? Ask Patti Smith

 

By Laura Kusisto

September 22, 2010 | 8:49 a.m.

 

All you creative young things eager to make it in the big city, Patti Smith has a suggestion: get out.

 

"New York has closed itself off to the young and struggling,” Ms. Smith said. “New York City has been taken away from you ... So my advice is: Find a new city." She suggests Detroit.

 

In a sign of just how bleak things have become, the Center for an Urban Future felt the need to hold a conference yesterday called  “Time to Be Creative." Capital writer Katherine Jose has a detailed play-by-play of the conversation, which she notes was pretty much all about real estate. (Ms. Jose is a former managing editor of The Observer.)

 

CUF director Jonathan Bowles said, “The city is facing new threats to its longtime dominance in the  creative fields,” in large part because “artists, arts organizations and  creative entrepreneurs” have “found it increasingly difficult to find  affordable space in the five boroughs to work, live, rehearse and  perform.”

 

http://www.observer.com/2010/real-estate/detroit-new-new-york

^I hope so. Detroit kicks ass. New York is a great city, but it is horribly overpriced.

We have been hitting on this general topic in several Cleveland threads..... such as Cleveland and its Artist Pioneers on the next page over.  If NYC doesn't want the people that gentrified its neighborhoods, we are happy to take em!

Probably no with limited exceptions.  I mean, come on...

Cleveland should be marketing hard toward these communites in overpriced coastal cities.  Something like the Collinwood effort on a much broader scale.

This was a topic of discussion on reddit.com a few months ago.

 

Shoot- I can't dig it up because the site is now blocked from my work!!

 

Anyhow, the overwhelming response from Detroiters was that scale of crime and political corruption were too overwhelming, and would prevent any sort of renaissance.