N.Y. sales pitch urges Millennials to come to Detroit for jobs

Photo/National Geographic-Wayne Lawrence

The worldwide media’s fixation on Detroit’s comeback reached a couple of new milestones this week when National Geographic published a long cover story on the Motor City and a new video emerged  online that urges New York City hipsters to move to Detroit for the lifestyle they truly crave.

The National Geographic piece, written by former longtime Free Press writer Susan Ager, offers a rich mosaic of all that is good and bad about Detroit in 2015. The headline on the story reads:  “Tough, cheap and real, Detroit is cool again.”
The subhead adds this: “With the nation’s biggest urban bankruptcy in the rearview mirror, the Motor City is attracting investors, innovators, and young adventurers.”

Meanwhile, a YouTube video produced by AJ+ and apparently a part of the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau promotional efforts depicts Detroit as “the hippest city in the world.”

Referring to billboards in the Big Apple that hype Detroit as the place to be for Millennials, the video emphasizes the sharp contrast between NYC’s extraordinarily expensive real estate and  the Motor City where, one young woman tells the camera, “for artists, you can basically almost live for free.”

With before-and-after visuals, the video proclaims that the new Detroit is “transforming from an economic wasteland to a mecca for food and culture.”

There may be quite a bit of truth to that for the downtown area and Midtown but, for a city with a high double-digit unemployment rate, the strangest part of this sales pitch is that it sells New Yorkers on the idea that the best thing Detroit has going for it is the opportunity for jobs.