>>97512013I lived there for a few years, off Woodward a few miles from Comerica. You get into certain areas and it becomes indistinguishable from any other moderate-sized midwest city. The suburbs are fine, too. A lot of the streets in the heart of the city are "don't walk here alone at night if you're female"-tier but during the daytime on those same streets you feel fine or only moderately on alert. Near the DIA and Wayne State it's great (and it has a big police presence).
For the most part though it's a trash heap. It's the small things, like grass overtaking huge portions of downtown sidewalk, or the massive amount of homes lining the freeways that are collapsing on themselves. The interesting thing about Detroit though is that it is far, FAR less bum-infested than San Francisco. It is an absolutely massive city in terms of square mileage, with few people residing within the main city borders, so the bums are spread all over the place and don't really congregate en masse like in SF. Plus they know that the majority of the people that they'll run into aren't up for being panhandled, so that sociable money-making aspect of bummery is moot. In a way it makes the city feel like a ghost town; homeless people make up such a big portion of the population and they're nowhere to be seen, hiding/squatting in god knows where. You can drive down Woodward and see no people on the streets, like NONE, and just start to wonder if something catastrophic is going on that you aren't aware of and everyone else evacuated. That's kind of the scariest part of the city, knowing that if you -did- find yourself on the streets at night all alone, maybe with a car emergency and no cell phone, somebody could approach you with ill intent and there'd just be no witnesses anywhere even if you screamed your head off for help.
I have weird stories with that city. Super bizarre things I've seen. Every once in a while I miss it, but then I catch a headline on Google News and come to my senses.
