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 …

Check out the Great Lakes Law blog from The Great Lakes Environmental Law Center in Detroit.
Here, you can read information about how invasive species (Asian Carp), global climate change and more can impact the Great Lakes.
-KG
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From Buffalo Rising: Read Urbanophile Aaron Renn‘s pep talk to Buffalo.
(Though many people in Buffalo already know how cool it is!)
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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 …

It’s “the most important decision in history” and “the reasons why spew forth by the hour on ESPN’s LeBron Tracker, Deadspin and Esquire’s LeBron Watch, The Plain Dealer’s daily LeBron Rumors section, and the neighbor guy cutting his grass.”

But Scene magazine writer Vince Grzegorek says enough.

In an article titled “Let Him Go,” Grzegorek argues the groveling and the speculation and the posturing is hurting Cleveland’s image. Maybe more than “The King” ever helped it.

“LeBron in Cleveland validates our place on the map; LeBron anywhere else wipes us out,” he writes, “It’s sad, but no more so than our false belief that the guy ever loved us in the first place.”

To which he adds, hilariously, “even if LeBron departs, we’re stuck with ourselves.”

“Not everyone in Detroit sleeps on a steam vent or eats racoons for dinner. Detroit is still a place were life is led. People bicycle. People enjoy a sunny day in public spaces. People love.”

So writes Noah Stevens, creator of thepeopleofdetroit.com, a series of essays and photography highlighting the colorful, beautiful people of the Motor City.

Stevens was inspired to create this website in order balance some of the negative press the city has been subject to lately, be it from Time magazine or Dateline.

“It is simply meant to examine the people who played in serrated crabgrass and never got cut,” he writes. “Too badly, at least.”

The New York Times is carrying an interesting article about the city of Memphis and the shrinking ranks of the local black middle-class.
As a result of predatory lending and job loss, residents the majority-black city have seen decades of economic progress reversed, The Times reports. The article focuses on the role played by Wells Fargo, and outlines the mortgage lender’s targeted efforts to sell high-interest loans in black neighborhoods. The results are hallowed out neighborhoods and declining wealth for blacks and latinos in metro Memphis.
According to the article, the weath …

Some good reporting from Tube City Almanac on the efforts of McKeesport, PA, to demolish vacant and abandoned properties.
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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).
-KG
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