If you’ve been thinking about moving to the great city, county, and state of New York, one campaign is definitely going to try to stop you. Billboards in several locations of New York City — SoHo, Midtown and Bushwick — are singing the praises of Detroit, Michigan, saying that’s where the jobs are! It’s just a little west of Brooklyn!
Stop trying to afford a one-bedroom place in Red Hook when you can buy an entire house in the Midwest! Okay, the signs aren’t explicitly saying that last thing, but Prince Media Co.’s Philip Kafka is urging the city’s creative community to think outside the box and give the beleaguered Motor City a try. And he’s doing it with not-very-subtle billboards.
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Kafka told Business Insider:
“Every time people find a neighborhood in New York, ‘the man’ moves there,” he told us. “You always have to keep moving east or west. Bushwick was east of Williamsburg, which was east of the Lower East Side, and so on.”
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He continued:
“Detroit is a lot more spread out than New York, so it’s hard to see what’s happening,” he said. “But once it’s connected and people see what Detroit is about, it’s new and unexpected.”
“It also has a great history, and we can never ignore that,” Kafka added.
Kafka has a reason for all the Detroit love, though — he’s opening a restaurant there, a Thai joint called KATOI, and he’s trying to hire a staff. But all the coolest kids think NYC is where it’s at and Detroit keeps making the news for unsavory reasons like bankruptcy and crime. New York is not exactly the “bumper bowling lane” of America’s big cities, but at least there’s stuff to do at every corner.
Will Kafka’s #MoveToDetroit campaign work? Maybe once New York stops being so awesome. It might be a congested mess, but it’s a beloved congested mess.
Source: Business Insider