How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass

In one of Curbed: Detroit’s Top 11 Books about Detroit, Aaron Foley, editor of The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook, offers the definitive inside look at one of America’s most talked-about and least understood cities. 

With a wry sense of humor, Foley, a native Detroiter, walks you through the most difficult questions about the Motor City, offering seven simple rules for making it there. Perfect for coastal transplants, wary suburbanites, unwitting gentrifiers, or start-up disruptors, this recently updated guidebook offers advice on everything from the glories of Vernors ginger ale to how to rehab a house to how to not sound like an uninformed racist. In twenty short chapters, Foley walks you through:

• How Detroiters do business

• The unofficial guide to enjoying Faygo

• How to be gay in Detroit

• How to raise a Detroit kid

• How to party in Detroit.

Both hilarious and insightful, this no-frills look at Motown is written for those who live there but also, as Vanity Fair put it, “for anyone participating in contemporary global urbanization who would like to avoid behaving like a subjugating dick.”