Detroit Decay Pictures

I came across this link in a Felix Salmon post, I think...but here are a handful of very interesting (sad, but interesting) pictures of once-grand Detroit landmarks.  Even for people who have never been to Detroit, the pictures are stellar even just a pure photographic sense:  Detroit in Ruins

Caffeine Deficit

When flying to Winnipeg last week, I read this in the the WSJ I brought along:

And Starbucks Corp., famous for saturating U.S. cities with its storefronts, has only four left in this city of 900,000 after closures last summer.

The full story is called Retailers Head for Exits in Detroit, and it details how it is kind of hard to make a city attractive to live in when there is a very small (and getting smaller) set of retailers actually still doing business. There is a good slide show (including one of the now-abandoned Starbucks) associated with the article: Detroit's Retail Exodus

Going to starbucks.com, it looks like Austin has nearly 50 locations (in a city of 650k).

Detroit: Houses Cheaper Than Cars

No joke: the average sale price for homes in Detroit during the past year fell below the national average for a new car ($22,650).

I found this on this post on Carpe Diem, an econ blog run by a UM-Flint professor.