Why? The city was HQ to the 3 auto companies. Oakland County, in the "Metro Detroit Area" is still one of the nicest + wealthiest counties in the Country.
It was in the top 5 a few years back, I am sure it's gone down a few spots since then.
Check out this video, pretty cool referencing the rise and fall (and rise again): http://vimeo.com/11021663
I've long maintained that Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the first half of the twentieth century. It was where enterpreneurs that wanted to make things settled.
My dad tells me stories of when he was a little boy in the twenties when the city was the best place on the planet to start a company and it was just bristling with entrepreneurs.
Sadly the city lost its way but it's starting to get it back. The destruction of Detroit is the easy story for the media however and the city's rise isn't being widely reported.
I'm honestly curious. I plan to buy a plot of land, maybe a house, somewhere in the next year or two, and Detroit has been in consideration because of its incredibly low prices (I don't plan to live there full-time; I live in a motorhome and travel, but it'd be nice to have a plot that I own and know I can always go park on for as long as I like if I feel like settling somewhere for a month or two). Detroit has a cool history, in terms of music. But, it also seems to be a bad investment, right now...no matter how cheap something is, it can always go lower, and Detroit seems to still be trending downward.
If you want to get a taste watch this video series: http://bit.ly/aO1wFm There are a lot of entreprenurial groups and funds that just weren't there twelve months ago.
If you want a more boots on the ground feel attend Maker Faire this summer. I've spoken to some of the O'Reilly folks who were very nervous about last years Faire and were quite simply in their words "blown away" by Detroit in a positive way. Tim O'Reilly compared the Henry Ford museum to the equivalent of the Louvre.
Houses in Detroit are already selling for $1, How much lower can they go? Chinese investors are snapping up hundreds of houses. Locals are even buying them and flipping them to outsiders.
Where can I find these one buck houses? Hell, I'd pay at least twice that.
Seriously, though, the lowest prices I see on craigslist right now, in the city, for an actual house, actually for sale, is $9900. Now, I'm not one to complain about a $9900 house on a reasonable chunk of land, but this one happened to have a gang tag on the garage door when I looked it up on google maps.
Sure, a can of paint is only ten bucks, but I can imagine a $9910 house going down in value. And, I don't want to park my motorhome in a place where it'll get vandalized...it costs a hell of a lot more than ten bucks to repaint a motorhome.
But, let's assume I come to Detroit this summer (I've been considering it) to look at houses. Where should I be shopping? What neighborhoods are centrally located, and coming up rather than going down? I kinda imagine the ideal neighborhood would be one filled with old folks. Old folks usually take pretty good care of their houses, they don't spray paint gang signs on garage doors, and they're mostly likeable mind-their-own-business sorts of people. A lot of the best neighborhoods in cities I've lived in have been older neighborhoods with older residents, that became hipster neighborhoods as the old folks passed on. That may just be selection bias...just the neighborhoods I liked and have seen grow (like East Austin, or the Montrose in Houston).
I'm not the most qualified to comment on this but I'll offer what I can:
In the city proper, I don't know that the 'old folks' thing will work well. The old folks still in Detroit in decent neighborhoods will not be areas with the cheap houses you are looking for (yes, there are some really nice areas in the city). The others probably left for nice areas outside of the city.
You'll probably want to look where the current wave of young people are moving to. I really don't know what these areas are but I'm sure you can look some up.
Midtown, with Wayne State University and the Detroit Medical Center, is probably a good area. Don't know too much about it but Tech Town[1] is at WSU. They are offering incentives to get employees to move and live in Midtown. I don't know that you'll find any super cheap housing there.
You could also look somewhere like Ferndale. It's just on the other side of 8 mile and maybe a 10-15 minute drive from downtown. You won't find the super-cheap $300 houses but you can find a really good deal. It's a nice, young, liberal town just on the border. It's also next to Royal Oak, a little more expensive area where you'll find a lot of young professionals. So that covers centrally located, safe and cheap, not super-cheap, but also not in Detroit proper, which also means lower taxes (as far as I understand).
I guess it all depends on your motivation. Finding something super cheap, centrally located and safe will probably be difficult.
"In the city proper, I don't know that the 'old folks' thing will work well. The old folks still in Detroit in decent neighborhoods will not be areas with the cheap houses you are looking for (yes, there are some really nice areas in the city)."
I don't mean "old, rich folks". East Austin was poor, mostly black and hispanic, and crime-ridden for decades before a resurgence began in the early 00s. But, a lot of the residents are still old folks who've lived through the whole process of decline and rebirth. Houston experienced white flight, and then began to recover in some of the older neighborhoods surrounding downtown (as far as I know downtown Houston is still a graveyard at night, and may not be fixable because there is no housing, the ground level streets are non-porous and have no shopping or nightlife). Same story, lots of older home owners that never left; their kids were grown when white flight happened, so they didn't feel as compelled to follow the good schools or were too poor to move or just didn't want to leave their home and stubbornly stuck around.
But, the rest of your answer is awesome, and is exactly what I was looking for. I don't actually need a house to cost $1 to consider it a good deal. But, it would take a really good price to get me to buy property in a place with weather as bad as Detroit. Hell, the place is unlivably cold six months out of the year, as far as this Texan is concerned. But, I'd consider buying to have a cheap summer parking place in a cool and interesting town, and if it happens to come with a house built in the 40s or 50s that I could renovate a bit, that's gravy.
Just thought of someone that might be a good contact for you to help scout out the area: Emily Doerr. She's opening a Hostel in Detroit. She's young and seems to be passionate about the city and bringing others in. I read an article about her in the Detroit Free Press but can only find a picture gallery on their site now.
Other people you could get in contact with are those doing urban farming.
If you want a good understanding of the Detroit neighborhoods read Model D http://www.modeldmedia.com/ In Detroit I'd look to the twenty somethings as they're the ones that are the urban pioneers. Where you see a lot of young people like Corktown or near Wayne State are worth investigating.
In contrast to downtown NW Detroit near Southfield and Grand River where I grew up houses are still in low six figures though half what they were a few years ago.. This is where you find the older folks. But you will also find the streets are a bit narrow for an SUV ;<).
For God's sake, dont buy a place in Detroit! If you want a house for cheap, go to Vegas or Phoenix, you can find a 3 bedroom home for less than 60K. Or if you want to see a mini-Detroit up close, just drive through Oakland. In 20 years, Oakland will be where Detroit is today.
Detroit is like seeing 'Atlas Shrugged' in real life. The unions drove away the business, and the blacks drove away the whites. So basically all the productive people left, and now the only professionals left are the criminals.
Bing is a good mayor, but it's too little too late. Only Robocop can save Detroit now.
bust is the natural stage in the boom town life cycle. What can be worse scenario for the Valley? People leaving it for high-tech jobs in some new Silicon Valley in China or India?
I.e. mostly salaried employees will leave and founders/investors or just rich people will have the Valley for themselves and will plot apricots on the emptied lands, ...
It was in the top 5 a few years back, I am sure it's gone down a few spots since then.
Check out this video, pretty cool referencing the rise and fall (and rise again): http://vimeo.com/11021663