A Tale of Two Cities

I have a confession: I used to hate Detroit. I have concrete reasons, too.

Spending four years at an out-of-state school affirmed my "I want to live/work anywhere but home" campaign. But I realize it was because in that new place I found a collection of individuals I could relate to. It's 100 percent true that you must surround yourself with like-mided people. This never happened for me in the 17 years before my departure, plain and simple.

However, now I have moved to a new city. One 300 miles from home - but one with so many parallels it's like their biographies have the same author.

Both are deemed  ghosts of their former selves. Past Promised Lands where folks who feasted have been reduced to impoverished skeletons. Those with sense fled in droves, you hear. Crime and welfare are up among the few unfortunate enough to remain. The school systems failed as well, full of "city" kids who are black and brown.

Detroit, home of Motown, was fueled by the Big Three auto manufacturers. Here, you could leave high school and land a job at a plant that would feed your family and afford you the "finer things." Because of their layoffs, you have people with years of experience - yet no education - suddenly jobless and having to "downsize" their whole lives.
Rochester, a city on the cutting edge of technology, was consumed by, well, advancements in techonology. Think Kodak, Xerox, Bausch + Lomb..... Former blue collar execs have the same EBT cards in their wallets as everyone else now.

But underneath the depression/recession, both places are secretly being re-created as small towns (trust me, even in Detroit playing six degrees of separation is EASY) where you can wake up one day and decide to make your dreams come true.
Places where a creative subculture is vibrant.
Places where young professionals are taking ownership of their surroundings.
Places organizations are starting to invest in with the hopes of rebuilding the entire metro area from the inside out. Starting with the "center city," or downtown, folk are making lofts and condos from once-abandoned buildings to attract a talent pool for the companies they want to lure into relocating nearby.

These are cities people return to after trying to make it somewhere else because they see the opportunity - to start a business, make a name for yourself in politics or non-profits, own an affordable home and live your passions while getting support from a community of forward thinking individuals striving to do the same.

Yes, people are finding the ingenuity that sometimes is born of desolation.  They're saying hey, let the media tell the story they want to tell. Screw the statistics. In the meantime we're going to keep climbing up!

Am I being idealistic?


There are people who believe in Detroit. People who love Rochester and are rolling up their sleeves to prove that a rose can grow from concrete.