Recent MSU Graduates Flock To Detroit To Start Careers

Photo: Crain's Detroit

Like many Rust Belt cities, Detroit has been slowly rebuilding from decades of neglect and the catastrophic recession in 2008 that nearly destroyed the city's auto industry, the lifeblood of its economy.

On top of that, the housing market crash that kicked off the recession hit Detroit the hardest, carrying the highest number of foreclosures nationwide during that period.

In spite of these setbacks, Detroit has been seeing a new kind of renaissance as of late. The Midtown region has been slowly revitalizing with new businesses and property prices returning to pre-2007 levels. Young adults just starting their careers or families have been flocking to the Motor City as new businesses move in to be a part of the city's cultural and economic revival.

"It's almost like a duty, if you're from Michigan, to move to Detroit now because it kind of needs us more than ever," Andrew Meftah, a media and information graduate moving into a place on 7 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue, said.

Aside from growing up in the metro Detroit area, Meftah's reasoning to settle in Detroit comes from his own interests in DJing and producing. Given Detroit's long history with electronic music and hip-hop, it only made sense that Meftah would want to be a part of that returning scene.

"A lot of the community of people that I produce for and DJ, you know they all live out in Detroit, so I personally, you know, it's a lot to always drive out from Lansing to Detroit," Meftah said. "I'd just like to be in the middle of all the action."

Younger residents have also been drawn to the city not just for its arts scene but also for more practical purposes such as new job opportunities or to continue their education at one of the nearby universities, Keller Williams realtor Hulya Erol-Garvett said.

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Why Detroit Should Be Your Next Long Weekend Getaway

Detroit has inspired a lot of nicknames: Arsenal of Democracy, Motor City, City of Trees, Hitsville, Hockeytown. All are out of date. Military spending headed west after World War II, the car industry started moving south in the 1950s, Dutch elm disease leveled the great archways of foliage in the '60s, Berry Gordy Jr. shipped Motown Records to L.A. in 1972, and the Red Wings haven't vied for the Stanley Cup since President Obama took office.

If there's a moniker that fits now, it's Cuba of the North. Like the onetime Pearl of the Antilles, Detroit is starting to emerge from decades of economic privation with an entrepreneurial energy that's reshaping the landscape. I grew up here, and, like other natives, I was depressed by the city's demise. But over the past year I began to notice a shift, a success that was sticking, particularly among the most skeptical demographic of all: Detroiters who had fled. People like musician Jack White, of White Stripes fame, and designer John Varvatos were returning to do business in their hometown.

Will Adler, whose family has been selling clothes in Michigan for 100 years, established his company, Will Leather Goods, in Oregon, but he returned in January to open a 9,000-square-foot concept store in a fabulously refurbished supermarket in the resurgent Midtown neighborhood. "Like the boxer who gets hit but keeps coming back, Detroit has never lost its heart," Adler says.

But, he adds, he's also seeing something new: a real thirst for freewheeling creativity, and not just in the community- based artists who are reconfiguring neighborhoods all over town. I saw it too, on a recent trip with my family. We found plenty to do, with or without the kids.

The city was built for drivers, with big six-lane boulevards left over from the Motor City days, and it's dotted with ethnic enclaves and their restaurant rows: Banglatown, Greektown, Mexicantown, and Corktown. Vintage neighborhoods such as Indian Village, Boston-Edison, and Palmer Park are holding on to their boom-era swank. In between there are the abandoned hulks of stamping plants and deserted residential areas, with many blocks turning into de facto nature preserves. It's not unusual to spot a pheasant, as my kids did, rising out of the ruins of a factory.

Evidence of renovation is everywhere, from the great stacks of wood on scissor lifts parked beside long-empty downtown department stores, to the many bike shops and craft distilleries and pickling plants popping up—the calling cards of neo-retro DIYers everywhere.

You still need a car to take in the scope of Detroit, but areas now exist where you barely do at all, like Downtown (a.k.a. City Center) or the Cultural Corridor. If you stay at the Westin Book Cadillac, a beautifully renovated 1924 hotel and residential high-rise in the Renaissance Revival style, you're right by Detroit's two big-league stadiums, Comerica Park and Ford Field, in the heart of City Center. For home games the Lions stay at the Book Cadillac, so you can, if you're 11 and wide-eyed, ride up and down in the elevator, as my son did, meeting football players as they make their way over to the stadium.


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WSJ: Detroit Listed As One Of 5 Cities Leading the Way in Urban Innovation

The city (Detroit) hopes to encourage startup businesses and small-scale redevelopment projects by creating ‘pink zones’ with a simpler approval process. PHOTO: SKIDMORE, OWINGS & MERRILL

Cities are the future.

In 2008, for the first time in history, more human beings lived in cities than in rural areas. The United Nations projects that by 2050 nearly two-thirds of the world’s projected 9.7 billion people will be urban.

Some urban planners scratch their heads about how it’s all going to work. As ever-denser, more populous cityscapes continue to emerge, the eternal struggle to balance growth and quality of life shows few signs of abating.

Yet some ideas that address these types of problems are in place already and gaining traction in a handful of cities, including a few that are right under our noses.

To find out what urban-development policies and experiments currently hold the most promise, we asked more than a dozen experts—urbanists, architects, planners—what cities they think are worth watching now.

Their choices were illuminating. While the world’s megacities—Tokyo, Jakarta, Shanghai, New York City—get a lot of attention, for the most part the experts we asked picked cities a tier or two lower in size. None of the cities they highlighted, they thought, were doing everything right. But in all cases, the cities are taking some actions that the experts say demand our attention.

The five we ended up with aren’t meant to be exclusive. A larger list could have included London, considered by many to be the world’s most dynamic city, despite increasingly unaffordable housing. Seoul and Amsterdam, meanwhile, are among the leaders in putting “smart city” tools into the hands of their citizens.

With that in mind, here are five innovative cities that are worth watching.

DETROIT: Reducing red tape for neighborhood redevelopment

Detroit, which emerged from bankruptcy in 2014, doesn’t have a lot of money for revitalizing all of its neglected areas. So it is trying something more radical: setting aside areas where normal development rules don’t apply.

Developers and designers complain that, like many cities, Detroit’s onerous and outdated rules make it too difficult to rebuild or repurpose long-neglected retail areas. To try to reduce those obstacles without a time-consuming and expensive rezoning process, the city is proposing a handful of “pink zones,” where red tape will be cut to help small developers and entrepreneurs open new businesses and revive aging commercial strips. The goal is not to eliminate zoning but to ease some of the constraints faced by new projects, like minimum-parking requirements or environmental-impact reports.

With a $75,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the city planning department intends to recruit designers and planners to come up with a general framework for anyone who wants to start a new business or build in those areas. This might include pre-approved plans that can be used by builders to speed up a new development.

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NYT: In Debt For Detroit Dream

Many residents of high-cost areas entertain the dream, at least occasionally: Give up the rent or mortgage grind, liquidate assets and start over someplace cheaper, perhaps one that could use a few spirited new residents.

Amy Haimerl and her husband, Karl Kaebnick, fell hard for Detroit and thought they could make their own dream of financial freedom come true when they moved here in 2013. But this is what happened: They put more than $400,000 (including all of their retirement savings) into a 3,000-square-foot, 102-year-old home in the city’s West Village neighborhood that was most recently appraised at just $300,000.

They claim, however, to be 100 percent satisfied and genuinely happy. Which raises a question: Are they insane?

Ms. Haimerl’s book about their migration and renovation adventure, “Detroit Hustle,” will be out on May 3. It’s a love song sung to a house and a city, but it’s also a money memoir, one marked by ignorance at the outset and a triumph of feelings over financial facts. It does not end in ruin, but it does end in debt.

So let’s start with those facts. Ms. Haimerl, who is 40, and Mr. Kaebnick, 44, had about $10,000 in liquid assets when they decided to move. They settled on a house on a block where only two homes were boarded up.

They bought the smaller one, a wreck with no wires or radiators or doors or pipes, for $35,000, liquidating Ms. Haimerl’s retirement account to close without a mortgage. “There is essentially nothing left inside the walls,” she writes in her book. “What we have is a pile of bricks with character.”

For the renovation, they were counting on the $110,000 that would be left from Mr. Kaebnick’s accounts. The previous owners had figured it would take $150,000 or so to make it habitable. What could go wrong?

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Detroit Has Your Attention. Now Can It Build A Startup Community For Its Future?

Photo: Trip Advisor 

What you risk when you have your struggles publicized as widely as Detroit’s is attracting more ambulance chasers than medics.

That is, when the call for help is too big and too wide, you can attract people who come more for their own gains than the city’s. But of course there is a danger too of not asking for help, of stubbornly keeping the doors closed, so the disease festers as the edges fray even further. Because for all the hype, Detroit, with its bankruptcy and blight, still needs a lot of help.

“Detroit isn’t going to be saved by one big thing,” said April Boyle, the Detroit native, all-mom band lead vocalist and Build Institute executive director. “It’s going to be saved by a million little things.”

One of the big themes of any entrepreneurship story in Detroit (a city pestered by reporters) is one of access and motivation. This was the case at the Tomorrow Tour event held at TechTown Detroit, as part of the first multi-city event series Technical.ly produced with Comcast NBCUniversal.

“This has to be about more than just affordable real estate,” said Paul Riser, Jr., the managing director of technology-based entrepreneurship at TechTown, a business accelerator founded in 2000 by leaders at Wayne State University with General Motors and the Henry Ford Health System. “There are reasons to build here.”

The city’s legendary automobile manufacturing reputation looms — Boulder-bred TechStars brought a mobility-focused accelerator and the 135,000-square-foot, GM-founded TechTown is adjacent to transportation technology incubator NextEnergy. There, too, are budding strengths in food and urban agriculture (shoutout to Campbell’s $231 million acquisition of suburban Garden Fresh last year), said Amanda Lewan, the cofounder of the Bamboo Detroit coworking space and editor of Michpreneur, a founder-focused news site.

Detroit also has the bones and the soul of all big cities — diversity (including a fair bit of gender-balance in IT salaries), research universities, culture and history and infrastructure (some of which is getting turned back on).

But for all that good sense, it’s hard not to instead focus on the passion that’s behind a city portrayed as in crisis.

Even those who think the fears are overblown say so with conviction. Ask Ida Byrd-Hill, a Detroit-native edtech founder, who stood up during the Tomorrow Tour and announced to applause: “We are not rebuilding ourselves.”

No, say those most seriously pinning their entrepreneurship dreams to Detroit’s future, it isn’t that the city needs to be remade.

“It’s an opportunity and the feeling that there is real work to be done,” said Jason Lorimer over $5 glasses of Tempranillo one night last month.

The founder of Dandelion, a seven-person civic-tech consultancy that serves as something like a general contractor on large projects, has been in Detroit for four years. First he moved from Philadelphia to follow an investment in a previous company of his, and then he stayed anchored to the network he built here. Lorimer is representative of so much Detroit change — and got pilloried for just that.

Well-intentioned as he may have been from the start, a 2013 essay of his on coming to Detroit to join in “its future” led his likeness to be used to symbolize a certain-kind of much criticized city newcomer: the white male entrepreneur and self-styled savior. Dozens of meme photos of him were shared by Detroiters who were trying to understand what it meant to be a struggling city with so much national attention and a new crop of excited residents.

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Eastern Market Announces 125th Celebration And 2025 Vision For Eastern Market District

Eastern Market, the public market that has nourished Detroit for decades, celebrates its 125th Anniversary this year. Eastern Market Corporation (EMC), the nonprofit organization that operates and promotes the market and the adjacent market district, announces two initiatives to honor and celebrate the Market’s rich history along with efforts to ensure the legacy of Eastern Market as a working food district in the years ahead.

After extensive public engagement and input, EMC is unveiling Eastern Market 2025, a 10-year economic development framework, to guide the market district in response to the changing development environment in Detroit and in the midst of sweeping changes in the food economy.

“Detroit has changed significantly since The Great Recession and the food industry is rapidly reinventing itself, so we decided to update our 2008 strategic plan with energy, resources and input like never before,” said Dan Carmody, president of EMC. “More than 600 Detroiters participated in this process, under the coordination of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center, along with outside advice provided by two firms that helped markets in London and New York mesh better with their adjacent neighborhoods.

The major barriers and opportunities that lie ahead made it imperative to more thoroughly assess global trends and clearly weigh stakeholder needs to correctly calibrate the interventions needed to help strengthen the market for the next 10 years and beyond,” Carmody added.

Eastern Market 2025 was made possible with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and builds on other market area plans funded by the W.K. Kellogg, Kresge and Erb Family Foundations.

“We welcome the potential of this plan to enhance Detroit’s urban core and help secure the city’s future growth by continuing the spirit under which it was developed – recognizing our city’s diverse voices, its entrepreneurial spirit and a desire for positive change,” said Katy Locker, Knight Foundation program director for Detroit.”

The full, 114-page plan is accessible online via easternmarket.com.

 Also, throughout 2016, the Market will celebrate its 125th Anniversary in ways that will touch each segment of the community that has benefited from the Market’s vibrant presence. This year, EMC is gathering at least 125 stories of how the market has played a role in the lives of shoppers, farmers, business owners, neighbors, community leaders and Detroiters. These stories will be displayed over multiple platforms to help Metro Detroit and the world better understand the true breadth and depth of the Eastern Market experience.

The 125th Anniversary celebration will include public events and opportunities to raise funds for the Market’s ongoing operations. “We hope everyone who has benefited from and appreciates Eastern Market will consider honoring this milestone anniversary by going online to become a Friend of Eastern Market and help ensure our mission will continue for at least another 125 years,” said Carmody.