Detroit and the Chicago model

[The Urban Politician]

I have been visiting Detroit threads and see a lot of new development going on in that city. It appears that several new neighborhoods are coming up. Personally, I think Detroiters don't have the same obsession nor high standards for architecture that Chicagoans have, but it's also a city that needs whatever it can get (at this point).

A lot of new single-family homes are coming up; they look WAY more suburban than Chicago's new ones--in the sense that they are much farther apart from eachother and they seem to have front-loading garages with driveways, whereas Chicago generally sticks to the tried-and-true rearload alley system (which is now officially part of the new Zoning Ordinance).

But I have to wonder. Do you think Detroit will look to Chicago and what it's doing in its neighborhoods as a model of its own redevelopment? I only ask this because outside of Chicago, Detroit is my favorite midwestern city and I think it is easily one of the coolest and hippest places in the midwest!

What do you guys think Chicago has to offer as a lesson to Detroit?

[24gotham]

Detroit is making huge efforts to re-establish itself as a relavant city. It is my understanding that the homes they are building, which I do think lack for decent design, are spaced that way because that is how the original city was laid out. Detroit was never as dense as Chicago or the East Coast cities, so even though it looks a bit odd, it is actually appropriate for the neighborhoods they are rebuilding.

[geoff_diamond]

While Detroit's core is incredibly dense, the neighborhoods just outside of downtown and beyond look more suburban, as Looper already stated, than in most other truly "urban" settings. As far as learning lessons from the new urbanist development going on in Chicago, I wouldn't count on it. Chicago uses alley-entrances and parking restrictions to curb traffic and improve transit use... Detroit, on the other hand, has no transit system to promote. Therefore, front-entrance walk-ups and flats will always continue to be a rarity there.

[BVictor1]

My grandmother lives in Detriot. The neighborhood that she lives in has beautiful architecture. While it is true that Chicago uses alleys to access their garages, Detroit also has alleys. Most of the houses in Detriot have detached garages which are behind the house like Chicago, they just access them VIA a driveway that runs alongside the house. Detroit's older stock of single-family homes is very architecturally diverse.

[T Garth]

Detroit is where the "American Dream" of the 20th Century was first realized...

a) Good paying job...Henry Ford began paying his assembly line workers $5 a day when the average US worker was lucky to earn that in a week

b) Own your own car...At that wage, workers could afford to buy the cars they built

c) Own your own house...At its peak, Detroit's population didn't quite reach 2 million, but the city boasted more single-family residences than both New York City and, believe it or not, Los Angeles

Alas, thousands of those houses have been abandoned and/or demolished in the past few decades