As a resident of Detroit and one who knows who the artists are, I have a lot to be critical about it. The biggest thing is that there is a cluster of houses that were painted in Highland Park, which is a suburb of Detroit that is poorer than Detroit–it can’t even afford its own police, really. The city literally cannot afford to knock down these buildings. So they are still sitting there, and now they just make an impoverished community more ashamed by the commuters who see it. This cluster of houses is right at the freeway, so that all the suburbanites who already think that Detroit is a pile of crap are just more attentive to it; it is thrown in their faces as they drive into the city to work. The project is more the product of a suburban graduate student collaboration than one of involved Detroit residents; for many of their projects, they never dealt with the area residents, not even asking for their input or permission. It is a project much more removed from the community than it really should be, especially considering how much the area is suffering already.They had good intentions, but the project is a failure in many senses, having brought attention to a blight that emphasizes tragedy and shame but does ignores the monetary problem. I just say this because a lot of other Detroiters feel the same way and since it has gained national fame, the locality (in its rawest sense) of this project has been dissolved. I only ask people to consider more than just the “artiness” of the project. There are a lot of issues going on in Detroit, and they cannot be forced or pressured into being magically solved with a radical paint job.

As a resident of Detroit and one who knows who the artists are, I have a lot to be critical about it. The biggest thing is that there is a cluster of houses that were painted in Highland Park, which is a suburb of Detroit that is poorer than Detroit–it can’t even afford its own police, really. The city literally cannot afford to knock down these buildings. So they are still sitting there, and now they just make an impoverished community more ashamed by the commuters who see it. This cluster of houses is right at the freeway, so that all the suburbanites who already think that Detroit is a pile of crap are just more attentive to it; it is thrown in their faces as they drive into the city to work. The project is more the product of a suburban graduate student collaboration than one of involved Detroit residents; for many of their projects, they never dealt with the area residents, not even asking for their input or permission. It is a project much more removed from the community than it really should be, especially considering how much the area is suffering already.They had good intentions, but the project is a failure in many senses, having brought attention to a blight that emphasizes tragedy and shame but does ignores the monetary problem. I just say this because a lot of other Detroiters feel the same way and since it has gained national fame, the locality (in its rawest sense) of this project has been dissolved. I only ask people to consider more than just the “artiness” of the project. There are a lot of issues going on in Detroit, and they cannot be forced or pressured into being magically solved with a radical paint job.