Creativity Quote by Meg White

Downtown Detroit gets framed here less as a punchline than as a hard statistic you can’t talk your way around. Meg White’s line has the blunt, percussive force you’d expect from a musician: spare wording, heavy downbeat. “Over 10 storeys” is doing stealth work. It doesn’t conjure quaint boarded-up houses; it points at the skyscraper scale of abandonment, the kind that turns a skyline into an accusation. The sentence is built like a drum hit: subject, comparative, superlative, world. No garnish, no sentimentality.

The intent reads as a reality check aimed at outsiders who treat “Detroit” as a vibe or a meme. By anchoring the city’s decline in vertical, expensive-to-ignore architecture, it makes disinvestment visible, almost cinematic. It’s not “some neighborhoods are struggling”; it’s “the downtown core itself is hollowed out.” That’s the subtext: failure happened in the place that’s supposed to symbolize civic power and economic oxygen.

Context matters because Detroit’s story is overfamiliar and often misused: deindustrialization, white flight, municipal bankruptcy, the ruin-porn era, then the uneven “comeback” narrative. A claim like this resists the tidy redemption arc. It forces the listener to hold two truths at once: that Detroit is culturally generative, and that the material consequences of policy and capital still loom, literally, in the empty high-rises. Coming from a Detroit figure, it lands as neither tourist gawking nor think-tank diagnosis, but hometown witness with a sting.