Detroit is in a hype bubble, I think (sauce: lived there for a bit). You can absolutely pay $2,000 for an apartment in a part of town with some blown-out buildings nearby and nothing much to walk to. Why you’d do that, I don’t know, but you can. There are jobs if you wanna work for GM or Quicken Loans, but that’s about it.

There are affordable rents there, but what you save in rent you pay in car insurance. Michigan has the highest in the nation, and Detroit has the highest in the state. I paid almost $500 per month for mine. The legislature keeps trying to change policy to fix this (as it is ultimately a policy issue), but it usually gets shot down by the GOP who think it goes too far and Democrats who don’t think it goes far enough.