Dan Gilbert Quotes

Detroit is a city that really stands out. It's been through a very difficult time. There's been a lot of pain here, and the city, physically, has suffered. You can see it in certain neighborhoods, and there's buildings downtown that have been abandoned.

Downtown Detroit has more vacant buildings over 10 storeys than any city in the world.

The real story of Detroit [...] can be summed up in seven words. Private enterprise built it, government destroyed it.

The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.

There's nowhere like Detroit; it's a modern necropolis: all these art deco masterpieces crumbling away.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Not every town can or should be saved.

I'm from Gary, Indiana, and everybody's damn near at the poverty level. It's a rough city to grow up in, and it's a modern-day ghost town.

In Detroit there are a lot of houses they are going to demolish because no one is taking care of them.

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

If those communities are left to decay, this city will decay.

I understand that Detroit was a pretty rough place to grow up in the '70s and '80s.

Nobody moves on purpose to Detroit.

Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell.

A great American city is fighting for its life.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

Things of this World are in so constant a Flux, that nothing remains long in the same State. Thus People, Riches, Trade, Power, change their Stations; flourishing mighty Cities come to ruine, and prove in time neglected desolate Corners, whilst other unfrequented places grow into populous Countries, fill'd with Wealth and Inhabitants.

I love Milwaukee, the rust belt. It's a very special part of America that's full of promise but also full of pain, where poverty is acute.

Detroit was a bad situation for me.

I had a lot of romanticised ideas of what Detroit was like, but I didn't get there until I was 30, and it was very different than I had imagined it.

Detroit can't come close to repairing the decades of neglect without addressing the crisis in our neighborhoods. I live in southwest Detroit near Woodmere Cemetery. My neighbors and I deal with the negative impacts of job loss, increased poverty, and pollution every day.

Gary is a really impoverished town; it's in industrial decay. There's low employment and things of that nature.

I grew up in the city of Detroit, where things were just bad.

Blight is like a cancer. This is one of those all-or-nothing things.

Schools alone are not to blame for underachievement. The breakdown of the family, poverty, and decaying cities with eroding tax bases have made a good public school education nearly impossible in many parts of the country.