The difference is SF has amazing weather, some of the best in the world. Detroit is a windy frozen wasteland 6 months of the year. I think they need to do a whole order of magnitude more self-destruction before they’ll really be able to keep people away.

That's a bit of an exaggeration but SF has both weather and easy access to a lot of natural beauty, hiking trails, and so forth.

Detroit has a nice Riverwalk and I'm sure any locals can point to other local things of interest.

I will say that I was at a tech event in Detroit in the fall. Things I would do (knowing what I do about the city even today) in SF at night without a second thought felt risky and many other attendees felt the same--and there were some safety incidents. It wasn't even so much the things that might make you feel unsafe in the Tenderloin. It's that if you were walking 1/2 mile to someplace it was just deserted.

I'm guessing you were at Kubecon as well. It was my first time in Detroit and overall thought the city was much nicer than expected. But to be fair, I mostly was just downtown during the day and we ended up staying in a suburb (Royal Oak) because all of the hotels within walking distance were booked by the time I registered for the conference. The drive between Royal Oak (adjacent to the city limits) and downtown Detroit had some areas that looked dilapidated or worse.

> The difference is SF has amazing weather, some of the best in the world.

Uhmm, I don't think I agree here. The Mediterranean has better weather all around. I like mid-west weather more if we are talking about US. SF is also very windy. Annoyingly windy. SF weather is "okay" but nowhere near the best. It does have great scenery nearby though.

Notably, there is a lot of coastal area in southern California that shares the same climate zone as the Mediterranean.

Comparison is with rest of the US.

It has the best weather of any "real" city. San Jose and San Diego aren't "real" cities. Parts of LA get too hot. Florida is too humid. Redwood City is the obvious winner for weather, but it doesn't have sports teams, concerts, museums--big city amenities.

"sports teams, concerts, museums--big city amenities"

Which, arguably, was more important 50 years ago.

This isn't obvious to me. Why aren't these as important?

Because mass media allows us to replace experiences that previously required physical participation (if only going to a specific location) with consuming those experiences anywhere we want - a trend that is only expanding/intensifying.

Watching a concert on Youtube or seeing a baseball game on TV are completely different than seeing them in person.

* * *

The GP literally said "...some of the best in the world"?

I just looked things up for SF and I have to say I would not regard it as some of the best in the world. Pretty temperate, with mild annual swings: summer highs of 23C and winter lows of 7C - that's actually a little on the cool side for me hah. But the rain is wrong way round, IMO wet summers and dry winters are better, and it seems like it's also quite humid?

My experience is obviously limited, and weather preference is subjective, so read the above as if it's coming from one idiot on the Internet.

Midwest = Kansas... Minnesota?

Weather has almost nothing to do with Detroit's economic decline, though.

Compare the population decline of Detroit with Milwaukee:

https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/detroit-michigan

https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/milwaukee-wisconsin

Note that, despite the relative decline, Detroit still has a higher absolute population than Milwaukee, which matters if we're to assume that (generally speaking) more population correlates with more potential economic activity (which may be a contentious statement in broad strokes, but these two cities are fairly comparable).

> The difference is SF has amazing weather, some of the best in the world

Correction - places near SF have amazing weather. SF itself - not that amazing.

SF weather is sometimes amazing, occasionally miserable, but generally not bad.

That just means the homeless thrive.

> The difference is SF has amazing weather, some of the best in the world.

Did you mean the Bay Area, or SF?

Most of the Bay Area has fairly nice weather year-round. San Francisco though, has pretty terrible weather. Foggy and cold most of the time.

It would actually be pretty poetic. 100 years ago, Detroit was one of the wealthiest cities in the world. It was perhaps the center of the US economy. The Model T was introduced in 1908 and by the 1910s and 20s, there were more than a dozen car companies forming every year, with the biggest ones being located in Detroit. The city was a manufacturing powerhouse and with the immense wealth generated, they built wonderful theaters, funded a world class symphony, and built great museums (many of these things still remain today). It became a cultural hub. If you told someone in Detroit at the time that the city would be in ruins before the turn of the century, they probably would have had a good laugh.