Life in New Detroit

New Detroit is a study in contrast, it has one of the most productive and technically advanced space-based industrial complexes in human space.  Indeed, almost 40% of all space hulls presently in service began life in one of the massive spaceyards in orbit, and there are few spacecraft at all that don't have at least a few components manufactured on the surface of New Detroit.

Despite its thriving ship-building industry, New Detroit is one of the poorest planets per capita in known space.  Due to a corrupt oligarchal government and massive overpopulation, the average citizen of New Detroit lives in incredible poverty.  Most live there entire lives sharing a tiny living space with their extended family.  Often they begin work for one of the big manufacturing firms as adolescents and continue until they die.  For those few who live long enough to retire, or the many that are injured too badly to ever go back to work, there are social welfare programs, but they barely provide a subsistence level income.  The vast majority of the population (about 97%) make up this perpetual underclass of laborers.

On the other end of the spectrum, the few hundred individuals who make up the very pinnacle of New Detroit society are so fantastically rich as to defy belief.  Few other places have such a staggering concentration of wealth, and these corporate masters live in massive 4-5 kilometer tall arcologies built with lost federation materials technologies found nowhere else.  These towers rise above the filth and pollution of the surface and present a gleaming contrast to the wasted urban blight below. 

The lower levels of these arcologies house the small middle class of New Detroit, the bureaucrats, servants, and soldiers that keep their masters comfortable, their businesses running, and their workforce in line.  In return for this vital service, they live in comparative luxury and have access to some of the advanced technology that makes New Detroit such a commercial powerhouse.