Forget everything you know about Detroit.

Detroit is a beautiful city. Detroit is a vibrant city. Detroit is a city with almost a million residents; it is not a city about to disappear.

Of course, Detroit has some pretty serious issues, which is why I'm here. Detroit has been losing population and business to its suburbs for nearly 70 years, leaving the physically huge city (covering a greater area than Boston, Manhattan, and San Francisco combined) with fewer than half the residents it had at its peak in 1950, and with such a concentration of business outside the city lines that the city's population actually goes down during the day.

But, incredibly, I have not met anyone here who is not optimistic about Detroit's future. Detroit's downtown is being revived, faster than many expected. The Detroit area is already becoming an immigrant gathering point; the region has over 120 distinct ethnic communities. And, what nearly everyone goes back to is the ingenuity of Detroit and Detroiters. This remains and will always remain a city tied to the auto industry, but but if new companies can fill in the creativity glut left by the decades of niot looking to the future, the city can rebound. Also, it's surrounded by fresh clean water, and water's the next oil.