"However small in number, Detroit’s white newcomers are both optimistic and messianic. They see Detroit as the Brooklyn of the prairies or, even more ambitiously, the next Berlin, a magnet for what urban planner Richard Florida calls the “creative class.” For struggling artists, Detroit’s bargain-basement prices are a lure, with single-family homes averaging just $21,000 and vast studios for a tiny fraction of New York rents. The city has become a mecca for Germans who revere the city’s innovative techno music scene. It is now home to several trendy art galleries, including a cutting-edge modern-art museum (MOCAD—the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit). And the hip now have watering holes, many of them retrofitted dives that serve microbrews and local food amid their iconic and now ironic knotty pine paneling, stainless steel bars, and flickering vintage neon signs that have never left the premises. Detroit’s Midtown district—perhaps the city’s hippest enclave (even if all of its residents could fit into a few blocks in Brooklyn)—has even attracted the Holy Grail of a dying Midwestern city: a Whole Foods." http://www.democracyjournal.org/28/notown.php