Detroit has really come up in the past 5 years. I recommend folks visit and check it out. Motor City's downtown actually has decent public transit via bus and light rail, and it's very walkable* during the nice season. Lots of entertainment.
* oh but watch out for bird/lime/lyft/uber scooters literally everywhere and everyone's drunk
Downtown has improved wildly since when even when I was growing up near there in the 80s/90s, but people don't realize how large Detroit is. It's nearly 140 square miles. Downtown is, charitably, 2sqmi, and that's including all the way up to Wayne State. The light rail is the People Mover loop downtown plus a trolley up Woodward, within that range.
The theft mentioned in the article occurred at 8 Mile and Wyoming, which is a 20 minute highway drive from Campus Martius in no traffic. "Clean Downtown" that happened when the city hosted the super bowl and other related efforts have very lopsidedly focused on the downtown area.
It's different, and it's not like it's without its problems. Of course there are still depressed neighborhoods, but there are a ton of development projects going up, lots of new restaurants, bars, nightlife venues, and arts and sports programming. By "coming up" I mean on the upswing, and you can definitely see the difference from a few years back.
I'm really into driving and all, but I've been in Detroit a year ago and it sucked. The only good thing about it was the Henry Ford Museum and the fact that Canada is just across the border.
You probably don't know how it used to be (which is also very different from my grandfather's idea of "how it used to be"). I was there last year, but I was also there for 25 of the past 30 years and the change from when I was a kid is startling. "I recommend folks visit and check it out" is not something someone would have said about Detroit unironically for a long while.
* oh but watch out for bird/lime/lyft/uber scooters literally everywhere and everyone's drunk