By Andrew Mickey, Q1 Publishing

The locals call it “The Pointes.”

Gross Point was one of the highest rent neighborhoods in the country.  It sits between Detroit and Lake St. Clair. Its wooded scenery, mild summer weather, and proximity to industrial areas have made it a popular residential neighborhood for industrial titans for a century.

The Pointes was one of the hottest real estate markets in the 1920’s. You had to have a mansion in Gross Pointe If you were an executive in Detroit’s booming auto industry.

Flash forward 90 years and we’ve got a completely different picture. There are “for sale” signs hanging off a lot of houses. As Big Auto downsizes, slashes salaries, and hangs on for survival, the rich have left town. In the process, they’re creating a great opportunity to get in at the bottom.

Thanks in part to the big problems at General Motors (GM:NYSE) and Ford, getting rough in Gross Pointe. But it’s probably worse in Detroit. More than one million residents have fled Detroit since 1950. When the jobs left, the people did too.

 First it was factory automation eliminating jobs. Now it’s a sharp decline in demand for the Big Auto’s SUV’s and an inability to compete against cheaper (and sometimes more efficient) foreign labor. The population of Detroit is now less than 900,000.

Recently, Home Properties Inc. (NYSE:HME), a residential real estate investment trust (REIT), unloaded 5,000 Detroit apartments on Lightstone Group. Home Properties said the sale was “consistent with our strategy of focusing our operations in…higher-growth markets.”

They’ve left Detroit for dead like a lot of others. The mass exodus has caused real estate prices to fall. Vacancies have climbed. With the aggressive selling, there are a lot of huge sales. Mansions that originally sold for $2 million just a few years ago are going for $1 million.

It’s not just in Detroit though. The entire U.S. Midwest, also known as the “Rust Belt,” is facing the same challenges. Towns that sprouted up around manufacturing centers have been abandoned in the same way as Detroit. Slowly but surely, that’s all starting to change.

A revival in the Rust Belt is appears to be starting slowly but surely and investors could be in for a pretty solid payoff.