Next time you hear about Detroit having no national chain grocery stores, consider this post from Detroit blog Sweet Juniper. It highlights the city’s Honey Bee Market and its amazing food and people.
Here’s some of his description, “while Detroit may not have any national grocery chains, we do have more urban farms and gardens than any other city in America and we boast some of the best independent grocers around,” he writes.
“Honey Bee Market, so close to downtown, has become sort of the de facto supermarket for all types of …

Our readers know we love to beat up on Forbes magazine for their frequent lists of dead/ dying/ shrinking/ etc. cities.
But let me give credit where credit is due…this is a really interesting and cool interactive graphic that uses IRS data to show migration within the US, sorted by county. Good job on this one, Forbes!
Click on a county to see inward and outward migration and where residents moved to/ or from. I could spend a long time playing with this.
Thanks to a frequent Rust Wire reader, my Dad, for …

From Buffalo Rising: Read Urbanophile Aaron Renn‘s pep talk to Buffalo.
(Though many people in Buffalo already know how cool it is!)
-KG
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That’s Bruce Fisher’s question, posed in this piece for Buffalo’s alt-weekly Artvoice.
What do you think?
-KG
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Editor’s note: This piece was contributed by Ivy Hughes, a Lansing, Mich.- based journalist. Read more about her on our contributors page. -KG

Five years ago my husband and I moved from Colorado to Michigan — by choice — for a job in the mortgage industry. We knew we were taking a huge risk, but at the time we had no idea we were venturing into a storm of opportunity we would have missed had we stayed in an economically thriving state.
Michigan is the underdog the media loves and …

Some good reporting from Tube City Almanac on the efforts of McKeesport, PA, to demolish vacant and abandoned properties.
-KG
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Has anyone seen the HBO Movie The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant?
It looks like it came out last year, so I’m a little late on this one. It is focused on the last few months of a plant in Moraine, Ohio (near Dayton).
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A native of Indianapolis, I could always tell that there was a difference between my hometown and Cleveland, where I lived for several years. Both were Midwest, working-class types of towns, but Indy was more suburban, less dense, kind of like Cleveland without the hard edges.

According to a recent report from the Brookings Institution, The State of Metropolitan America, understanding the differences between Indy and Cleveland — or Columbus, or Pittsburgh, or Minneapolis — is a crucial part of understanding each city’s individual fix. The 172-page report, which already has received praise from mainstream pundits such as David Broder, compiles data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to paint a demographic portrait of the United States, focusing on the 100 largest metropolitan areas.

President Barack Obama will speak in Youngstown today, seeking to highlight successes from his $787 billion stimulus bill, according to the Plain Dealer.
The president will make a private appearance at the VM Star steel plant, which is set to undergo a $650 million expansion. The stimulus bill helped pay for improvements that will pave the way for 350 new jobs.
The big joke in Youngstown is that the city is a popular place for presidential candidates to visit once every four years, so it’s meaningful that the president is visiting. The …

Above: The party’s not over in Vegas.

Some urban thinkers thought one silver lining of the economic crisis could be a slowdown in unsustainable sprawl, particularly in overbuilt areas of the southwest, like Las Vegas.
But that appears not to be the case at all, according to this New York Times story.
Despite home prices having declined 60 percent in four years, and despite the fact that there are nearly 10,000 empty homes with 5,600 more expected on the market soon, the Times reports, “builders here are putting up 1,100 homes, and they …