I am very familiar with Michigan and all it’s ups and downs – I lived there until I was in my late 20s and my family just sold a some property in the Northern part of the state. Are you talking about buying real estate in Detroit? Did you know that the mayor, Dave Bing, has suggested (very seriously) that he would like to bulldoze up to a third of the city and have it revert to whatever it would revert to? (see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/us/21detroit.html). The schools in Detroit are so underfunded that there is also serious talk of having class sizes of up to 60 students – so very few stay in the city if they have the the ability to leave. The NYT just ran a very interesting story about the decline in the population of Detroit and some attempts to maintain neighborhoods (including training citizens to patrol their own neighborhoods ). (see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/us/26detroit.html) On the other hand, there are a lot of small high tech businesses that have sprung up around Ann Arbor (home to the Univ. of Mich.) and so commercial real estate there might be interesting – although I know almost nothing about that. Also, artists seem to be migrating to the city to take advantage of large studio spaces that are dirt cheap: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102053853
See also this Op/Ed piece where someone bought a Mies van der Rohe there for $100,000 and someone else bought a house for $100. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08barlow.html
There might be bargains, but I’d be careful if I were you.
