Someday, someone is going to start to discover some of those houses....
Detroit is loaded with intact blocks of solid, well-designed houses. However, a house is just one part of a larger package of what today's homeowners increasingly want, and it's something Detroit doesn't have in great abundance: complete neighborhoods. I blame Detroit's wide commercial streets, for one thing.
Take a Google Street View tour down any of the mile roads, and major north-south streets like Livernois and Telegraph, and even in areas where they're not blighted, they still lead a lot to be desired. They're wide, long, straight, out-of-scale corridors planned during that strange post-automotive pre-freeway era to move vehicles efficiently not just throughout the city, but the region. They may be commercial corridors, but they don't serve as focal points for a neighborhood. Instead, they serve as unintentional barriers,
forming dividing lines between neighborhoods. Incomplete streets, incomplete neighborhoods.
Here's a Google Street View shot of Woodward Avenue by Palmer Woods:
http://g.co/maps/34c8m
Warren Road in Warrendale, Detroit's last "white neighborhood"*:
http://g.co/maps/bxd2d
Jefferson Avenue at the south end of Indian Village:
http://g.co/maps/9ybsg
Mack Avenue at the north end of Indian Village:
http://g.co/maps/gzpzr
Woodward Avenue next to Boston-Edison:
http://g.co/maps/ghfe6
When I look in neighborhoods in Buffalo outside of the West Side, the streetscape along major streets may not be pretty, but they function better as neighborhood centers. Part of it is the scale; part of it the presence of two-story buildings, part of it the mix of commercial and residential uses.
Here's Hertel Avenue, the commercial core of Buffalo's North Park neighborhood, and a wide street by Buffalo standards:
http://g.co/maps/zdnps
Bailey Avenue in Kensington, the neighborhood I grew up in. It's now considered "ghetto", but it seems more human-scaled than any equivalent neighborhood in Detroit:
http://g.co/maps/durtf
A small commercial node on Parkside Avenue, the core of the Parkside neighborhood:
http://g.co/maps/q947s
Amherst Street in the up-and-coming Black Rock neighborhood:
http://g.co/maps/ecvr4
West Side? One of the "nodes" along Elmwood Avenue in Elmwood Village:
http://g.co/maps/d3fp9. And another:
http://g.co/maps/qr9mw. And another:
http://g.co/maps/drb4r. And another:
http://g.co/maps/wefpj. Corner of Elmwood Avenue and Allen Street in Allentown:
http://g.co/maps/ghr6x.
Major commercial streets in Hamtramck like
Joseph Campau and
Caniff have the same sense of scale as those in Buffalo, and the enclave remains quite vibrant. Adjacent to Highland Park? Big 'ol
Woodward.
* It might be un-PC to point out Warrrendale or Parkland. I've always been fascinated with the concept of holdouts, though. In Detroit, unlike Cleveland or Buffalo, there is such a sharp demographic shift that takes place at the city's municipal boundaries, and it always struck me as odd. Why didn't blacks in Detroit move beyond the city limits, except for Southfield? In Cleveland, even with a similar history regarding racial and ethnic conflict as Detroit, the idea of African-Americans in the suburbs is taken for granted. In Buffalo, there are sharp divides between black and white in some places, but those dividing lines are formed by physical barriers. such as a wealthy neighborhood or a wall of factories and railroad yards.
