I wrote this up for my players in a game that went 2 sessions before we starting doing something else. There's not terrible much here, but perhaps it will be of use to someone. I didn't have access to any official cannon except an SR timeline when I wrote it, so if I have crossed something official folks have written, that's why.
Detroit in the 2070's[ Spoiler ]
You wanna hear about Detroit, chummer? I can tell you, allright. I've been kicked around the D for near a century, but they never rattled my brains. I remember coming up here like it was yesterday, back in the nineteen seventies! Things sure have changed since then- whole world's gone crazy. But I guess if you young folk have got sense enough to listen to your elders and get some history, then maybe there's hope yet for this old town. Just keep those drinks comin', wouldn't want my throat to get dry while I spin my yarn.
The New Millenium
So the first thing to know is that Detroit used to be famous for the automobile. 'Round the turn of the 20th century they started buildin' 'em here, and back when I was a kid, seemed like Motown was what Detroit was always gonna be. But things went haywire just after the start of the 21st century, and the Big Three (I'm talkin' car companies now, not megacorps) found themselves going bankrupt. Back then I didn't pay much attention, but I remember something about banks not making loans, which stopped folks buying cars, which pretty much gummed up Motown's entire economy. See, the car companies being in trouble meant everyone was in trouble, 'cause just about everybody back then got their income from the car companies in one way or another. The guys on the line got laid off first, and then the engineers, and next the parts manufacturers couldn't sell their wares, and the roach-coach driver didn't have workers to sell sandwiches to, and even the joygirls couldn't make time no more. It was all pretty bleak for a while, but then Ares showed up and started buying corporations by the block, starting with GM (that's General Motors, biggest of the Big Three, in case ya don't know). Ares Financial started making low-interest loans to car buyers, and it didn't take ol' Lucius Aurelius long to turn GM right around and make it profitable again. Within a couple years, the economy started to recover, and Detroit seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief in 2010. 'Course if we had known then what was coming, we woulda started crying instead.
Of the original Big Three, only Ford made it out the other end of the credit crisis intact, as you may know since they are still around to this day. Chrysler and Nissan merged, and managed to struggle on, though they lost a lot of market share. Things seemed to be getting back to normal. Then in 2011, folks started having pointy-eared babies, which caused a bit of an uproar. Prophets predicted doom (when don't they?), but let's face it: elf and dwarf babies are cute, and nothing much to get upset about. VITAS, on the other hand, was scary as hell. All that pollution that had been pumping out of the factories and power plants over the century or so since the industrial revolution? Well, those who got hit by the virus became deadly allergic to it, and you could catch the virus from people who were infected. VITAS spread like a cheap slitch, and with it came riots, looting, and then martial law. By the time it had passed, a full quarter of the world's population was dead, and upwards of half the people died in some of the slums around here, where medical care was scarce and folks were packed in like sardines. Then came goblinization in 2021, and then another strain of VITAS, and more riots and martial law. Basically, the whole world went to hell for about 20 years, but in the background that whole time, Ares was quietly expanding.
Ares Macrotown
After the whole debacle with the credit crisis, the state and local government folks got the idea that having so much of the economy in one sector might not be such a good idea. Turns out Ares would help the guvvies with that. After Ares bought GM, its world headquarters was moved to the Renaissance Center right there downtown. Then they bought General Dynamics, and Bank of America, and even NASA, the old U.S. government space agency, and who knows how many little companies besides. Ares operations in Michigan were expanded, and an economic boom started in Detroit that brought a lot of folks back from the 'burbs to work in the city proper. Old slums that had been mucking up the city's image for decades were torn down, with shiny new neighborhoods built in their place for Ares employees to live in. When the orks and trolls all got herded up in Veteran's Park in Hamtramck, Lucius Aurelius paid for better shelters and food for those poor folks out of his own pocket. Then he bought the Tigers (who had been on a losing streak), tore down their shoddy old park and built the Macrodome in the space of a few months, and the next season, they pulled off a World Series win. The big computer crash of '29 caused more economic problems, but not for Ares; they just snapped up more businesses weakened by the sudden economic collapse and somehow made them more profitable. By 2030, seemed Ares and Lucuis Aurelius were everywhere you looked. Folks around here were positively in love with that man, and his budding megacorp. That good will was passed down to his son Leonard, who took over the business then. But Leonard's time at the helm of Ares was all too short.
Knight Rises
Damien Knight, that old corporate shark we love to hate, managed to sneak a majority share of Ares out from under the noses of the Aurelius family by using some kind of coordinated computer stock manipulation, dubbed the Nanosecond Buyout. Next thing you know, he's the CEO and Chairman of the Board. Unlike the Aureliuses, Knight wasn't much into philanthropy; profits and power seemed to be his motives. Over the next few years he started buying off members of the city council. Then he took advantage of a corruption scandal in the Detroit Police Department to have our boys in blue replaced by Knight Errant Security, an arrangement that remains to this day. Now most folks didn't mind all these things since the economy kept getting better and better with Knight around. Over time though, he started cutting back wages for the lower-end workers, and some neighborhoods began the slow descent into slumhood. K-E started getting lazy, and eventually places like Hamtramck and Inkster became the drekholes they are today.
My personal favorite stunt of Knight's was the Peoplemover II project, a mass transit initiative that would set up subway tunnels connecting the entire metro area. It was proposed in 2037 by one of Knight's flunkies on the Detroit city council, and ended up being funded by the state and pretty much all the municipalities in the sprawl. Guess who got the contract? Yep, Ares. They began digging tunnels starting in the old salt mines beneath the city, but by 2042, the project had to be scrapped when most of the tunnels were 'accidentally' flooded. The project's funding floundered, and eventually it was scrapped altogether, but not before Knight had swindled billions in taxpayer nuyen out of the various governments involved.
Windsor
Now something else happened in 2030 that's important, and that's the formation of the United Canadian and American states. Funny thing is, Canada always seemed just like another state in the old U.S. to me even before they were officially merged. Anyway, once the Act of Union was signed, Windsor was no longer in a foreign country, and travel and trade began to flourish across the two bridges since you didn't need a passport to cross anymore. Oh, I forgot to mention the East Span! It was the second bridge to Canada constructed in Detroit, built by none other than Ares Construction back in the teens. So, due to the way the local laws got grandfathered in (no comments about my age, thanks), prostitution was legal in Windsor, which sparked the development of a huge red-light district there. Now, just because it ain't legal doesn't stop the joytoys from prancing up and down 8-Mile, but for law-abiding salarymen, Windsor became a very popular hangout. The Detroit casinos opened satellite branches there, and Windsor grew much richer as a result of all the new "vice tourism".
Meanwhile, in Southfield...
Now something I haven't mentioned so far is that Ares wasn't the only megacorp building a power base in the area during the early 21st century. A consortium of Japanacorps that called itself the Japan Business Society of Southeast Michigan was buying up land in one of the nearby 'burbs. The corps that made up the JBSSM (megas like Fuchi, Mitsuhama, Renraku and Shiawase, as well as several smaller J-corps) eventually decided that paying taxes to the local government was a pain, so they just took the whole city over. It took some years to set it up, but they got their guys onto the city council, managed to buy the Civic Center from the town under false pretenses of charity, and finally in 2027, they had enough clout to just dissolve the city and turn it into the Southfield Extraterritorial Enclave, or SEE. All the private citizens living in the former city of Southfield that weren't in the direct employ of a JBSSM member corp were kicked out of their homes and given a token stipend for their troubles. Some folks tried to fight it with lawsuits, but even with thousands of plaintiffs, there wasn't much they could do against the combined legal might of the JBSSM. In addition to home thievery, they kicked out ALL metahumans, employee or no, along with anyone immediately related to a metahuman. Many of those folks ended up at refugee shelters in Hamtramck or on Belle Isle, and the J-corps earned a hefty helping of meta hatred for what they did.
Anyway, after they created the SEE, the four megas in the JBSSM started work on Renraku Arcology 2: Electric Boogaloo, better known to us locals as the SEE-Hive. Unlike in Seattle, this time it was a shared venture, with Fuchi, MCT, Shiawase and Renraku each owning a quarter of the arcology. They bulldozed a full square mile worth of residential zone (remember all those people they kicked out?) and began construction in 2043, and by 2052, it was done. It made the headlines worldwide, and slowed commuter traffic on the Lodge and Reuther freeways due to gawking at the monstrous thing. Anyway, much like its Seattle predecessor, the lower levels of the SEE-Hive (or Southfield Arcology by its official name) are a giant mall. As soon as it opened, there was a very popular boycott movement started by Mothers of Metahumans due to the poor treatment the JBSSM had given metas in years past. In order to avoid plunging profit margins, the JBSSM had to eat their hat, and in 2054 they rescinded the ban against metahumans entering the SEE. MoM in turn lifted the boycott, and the SEE-Hive mall started see quite a bit of business.
The Underworld
I guess that brings me to the seedy side of life in the D. We have all the usual organized crime syndicates at work in the area, including the yakuza (based in and around the SEE), the tongs, and the mob. They all do the usual things that crime syndicates do (drugs, prostitution, gun running, theft, racketeering, and so on), but with a bit of a twist. During the first big computer crash, some bright thug got the idea to start offering the mob's services as a kind of banking network. They would hand out markers (they called the chips 'zitti') in exchange for nuyen or other favors, and you could use the markers as cash at mafia-run establishments all throughout the city, for anything from groceries and medicinal drugs to weapons and black market cyberware. It wasn't too hard for them to do, since they already had guys who were pretty good at keeping the books straight. Though at that time it was only on a small scale, and only for as long as the Matrix was down (preventing easy electronic transactions with real cred), it turned them a tidy profit, and they kept it going even after things got back to normal. More recently, during Crash 2.0, the practice really took off all over the sprawl, and the mob became an almost legitimate organization, depended on by just about everyone in the lower class neighborhoods to do business in an efficient manner. That earned the mob a lot of cred with the common folk, and Knight Errant has an especially hard time pinning anything on mob bosses these days thanks to that. Seeing the success that it brought, the other syndicates have picked up a similar practice, making markers pretty handy things to have, even if they can only be used "in-network."
One more thing I should mention, while on the topic of organized crime, is Aztechnology. Little Aztlan is down by the Ambassador Bridge, and a gang called Los Jaguares has claimed it as their turf. Some say the gang's just a front for AZT, but whether or not that's true, those guys are some mean hombres. The thugs in charge of the mob and the yaks seem like civilized gentlemen compared to those cutthroats. Word has it they are into organ legging, human trafficking, and the most addictive drugs and BTLs you can find in the sprawl. If I were you, chummer, I'd steer clear of those guys, or at least stay off their bad side.
Awakened Detroit
The Awakened World is alive and humming in the D. We got ghouls slogging around in the sewers, vampires lurking in the shadows, mages and shamans practicing their craft all over the city, and even a few dragons that you can catch a glimpse of now and then. I think it was some time around 2050 when folks on the Belle Isle Ferry took the first pictures of a leviathan known as the Lake Erie Monster. Since then I hear TerraFirst has claimed that same dragon as an ally in the fight against pollution. We also had a dragon alight on the tippy-top of the Ren Cen back in '57. Folks took to calling that one Redwing, and it became something of a mascot for the hockey team, even though nobody has seen it since.