[Joga Bonito]

Not really a good idea for a few reasons:

1. Houses are cheap because the crime in those areas is absolutely awful. The thing about Detroit is that you can have a block that looks relatively safe but across the street have an entire block of houses that are burnt out, boarded up, or abandoned. Its EXTREMELY common for one block to be safe and the next block over to be a complete warzone. I am not exaggerating, as I routinely visit friends and drive through the city myself.
2. In addition to crime driving the prices down, most of these houses have been completely vandalized and stripped to their cores. You would have to put extensive money into bringining the house up to a liveable condition.
3. Taxes are extremely high and access to emergency services is increasingly scant. Cops really don't have the manpower at this point to put any attention to crimes other than murders and even then people can wait 2 or 3 hours for an ambulance to show up.
4. Don't discount your house getting stripped again after you fix it up. I have seen this happen to quote a few people. Buy a house for 5,000 dollars and spend 35,000 dollars on it only to have it ransacked later.
5. Buying and sitting on houses is a big problem here, because everyone is waiting for the value to rise. That will not happen if everyone does it though, so many people people ending up hurting themselves investment wise, since no progress is being made in those neighborhoods.
   

Most of the rebirth you are reading of is occurring in the Downtown and Midtown areas since they are getting heavily gentrified. You know the yuppies are moving in full force when a Whole Foods is getting built in the neighborhood. I have also met quite a few yuppies coming in from places like DC and LA, but they all live Downtown or are in Midtown where there's also a large state school. The bottom line is you really have to do your research on the neighborhood you want to buy in. I'm not sure where you live exactly but that's an exhaustive exercise within itself. There are also some historic neighborhoods like Palmer Woods or Boston Edison that feature large mansions for a heavy discount but they are still pretty expensive for a young person to try to buy and hold.