Nothing beats a good ol’ dot density map. In this case each land parcel was assigned a centroid (center point) and visualized by the year a building was built on the parcel. This accounts for newly vacant parcels, but not parcels that have more than one building.

Most of the newer construction has occurred in the more vacant areas, which could also represent larger land parcels being reduced to a point location (i.e. a hospital). There is some very interesting clustering of Pre-1900 and 1980-Present construction in Midtown, west of Midtown, and Corktown. At least in construction, Old Detroit and New Detroit prefer to be closer together?