Earlier this month, Silicon Valley's preeminent venture capital firm Sequoia Capital came to Detroit in search of investments. Its representatives remained mum on their intentions, but noted the city's role in mobility presented opportunities they didn't want to miss.

Five years ago — Detroit filed its infamous Chapter 9 bankruptcy on this date — an investment from Sequoia was unthinkable. Detroit's $14 billion in long-term debt and $327 million budget deficit in 2013 left the city and its businesses with little confidence. City workers, including police and firefighters, saw pay cuts. City services were dismal at best.

Now things are looking up, relatively speaking, with a massive influx of investment from outsiders like Flex-N-Gate, which built a 450,000-square-foot auto parts plant in the I-94 Industrial Park on Detroit's near-east side with plans to hire more than 400 employees, and Ford Motor Co., which is planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to transform Michigan Central Station to house 5,000 workers in Corktown. Countless other retail, tech and restaurants now call Detroit home.

These are reasons to celebrate — Detroit is finally getting the R-E-S-P-E-C-T it deserves. But you'd have to see the city through some very rose-colored glasses to believe its made anything but incremental steps since emerging from bankruptcy.

Detroit Public Schools remain nearly ruined — more than 90 percent of its eighth-grade students are not proficient in mathematics and reading — and the region's auto businesses on which Detroit's future is so reliant are facing unprecedented disruption. Detroit's future may hold opportunity, but it's anything but written and a new international bridge does not prosperity make. This city's success remains under the guillotine.

Salary growth for the region, which is likely higher in the city itself, remains well below the national average. It saw the steepest decline in the second quarter of 2018, -0.8 percent, of any major metropolitan in the country, according to a recently published report from PayScale.com.

We've seen many new companies wax poetic about committing a portion of new jobs to Detroit workers, Flex-N-Gate as an example. But even those companies find it challenging because of a lack of skills held by city residents. The contractors that constructed Little Caesars Arena signed an agreement with city officials, in exchange for $250 million in tax-exempt bonds and other incentives, to maintain an employment base consisting of 51 percent residents of Detroit. They failed to do so and were fined more than $5.2 million, a pittance for the incentives they received.

The residents of Detroit, 79.7 percent of whom are black, are certainly not dancing in the streets thanks to new investments.

Roughly 38 percent of the jobs in the city are considered high-skill, requiring at least an associate's degree. That compares with 35 percent in Wayne, Macomb and Oakland counties, excluding Detroit, according to the Detroit Workforce Development Board. And with 63 percent of working Detroiters possessing no more than a high school diploma, those jobs go to suburbanites — 71 percent of all jobs in the city in 2014 (the most recent data available) were held by nonresidents.

This leaves a labor force without labor. So much so that it's crippled Detroit residents' ambitions that many stopped looking for work all together. And despite several ribbon cuttings and bold headlines, the city's labor force participation rate — those of working age who could be employed — is the lowest in the nation among major metropolitans at 55.2 percent in 2016, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Post-bankruptcy investments have allowed the region's poverty rate — those living below the poverty line, which is a sliding scale depending on factors like household size — to shrink in recent years, dropping several percentage points since emerging from bankruptcy in December 2014, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. But at more than 30 percent, it remains the highest in the nation. For context, Chicago's is 18 percent; Birmingham, Ala., is 24 percent.

Median household income for metro Detroit, despite being home to some of the largest employers in the nation, remains near the bottom in the U.S. at about $56,000. Only Orlando, Miami and Tampa, Fla., perform worse.

So at 4:06 p.m. today, the power players involved in Detroit's historic bankruptcy will gather at Republic Tavern on Grand River and Cass avenues to celebrate the city's new lease. There's no reason they shouldn't. Since emergence the city has balanced its budget several years in a row, vastly improved city services and received more than a few upgrades from credit agencies. These are all signs of a functioning city.

But they'd be remiss to forget that Detroit has so very far to go to be top performer. Inequality, income and otherwise, remains a top priority. The schools need a bona fide solution. Poverty must be addressed. For while the grand bargainers have moved on, most of Detroit has not.

The investors from Sequoia Capital may have only seen Detroit's best parts, what is defined in the city's comeback story. But they are savvy enough to understand whether a region can create and sustain talent and prosperity. We'll have to wait to see if these early investors in Apple, Google, YouTube and Instagram will reward Detroit's potential with an investment.

But our business and political leaders shouldn't be satisfied. Because to paraphrase the late author Elmore Leonard, while other cities get by on their good looks, Detroit has to work for a living. So get the people working or reap a future we just narrowly escaped.

Editor's note: The figure representing the black population of Detroit was incorrectly rounded in an earlier version. The current version is correct.