For a while, Detroit was known for vacant, crumbling homes and rock-bottom house prices. I found neighborhoods like this one, Brush Park, transforming.

In Brush Park, construction equipment whirs non-stop. Old Victorians glisten with new interiors. “What brought me back?” said John Davis, a Detroiter who moved away, then returned. “Economic indicators.”

Some houses sit on blocks alone, reminders of an essential struggle: A city built for 1.8 million residents now has fewer than 700,000. The dilapidated houses left behind have been torn down by the thousands.

For a while, Detroit couldn’t pay for services most take for granted. With a cheerier budget picture, the city has resumed cleaning out storm drains and sending street sweepers down neighborhood streets, where years of grime had accumulated.

Construction equipment crowds streets. Dreams of a house for a few thousand dollars seem like an old memory in some areas, where buildings can list for more than a million.

Brush Park is not far from downtown Detroit, with its buzzing collection of remade office spaces, or from Little Caesars Arena, a new sports facility.

But the frenzy of building hasn’t taken hold all over. Take Poletown East, for instance, a few miles from downtown.

Detroit goes on for 139 square miles, and parts like this, which lost homes and people when an auto plant was built in the 1980s, still feel empty.

Some of the streets here are silent and wide open. Elsewhere, clumps of debris appear: a crumpled living room chair, a television, a forgotten pair of shoes.

“Just look around,” Treasure Jackson, 19, said as she waited for a bus. “There’s no one here. There’s nothing left.” Her hope? To move away.

Leaving is Detroit’s biggest problem. But departures have slowed a lot and Mayor Mike Duggan says ending the shrinking – and starting to grow again – is the true test of the city.

This is Michigan Central Station, a hulking train depot shuttered 30 years ago. It became one of Detroit’s best-known ruins – a symbol of the city’s long, miserable slide. New windows have been installed and there’s talk of remaking it. But no plan has been announced, so the building, and the symbol, must wait.

“The population number is the number by which we either win or we lose,” the mayor told me. “Is this the year we turn the corner?”