Features

Detroit: Pumping new life

28 Sep 2015 by Jenny Southan
After decades of decline, Detroit is building a better future thanks to local billionaires and creative start-ups, says Jenny Southan Three years ago, Detroit's Police Officers Association told visitors to enter the city at their own risk. At the time, it was the second-most violent place in the US, behind Flint, also in the state of Michigan. In 2013, with a population of only 700,000, Detroit came out top, with 2,072 violent crimes per 100,000 people. It also had the highest poverty rate, at more than 40 per cent. Things haven’t been too good for the Motor City for a while. At 360 sq km, Detroit prides itself on the fact that it could fit Boston, Manhattan and San Francisco in its boundaries and still have space left over. But between 1950 – when 1.8 million people lived there – and 2010, it lost 60 per cent of its population, and in 2013, with US$18.5 billion of debt, the city was declared bankrupt. Detroit became a ghost city; eerily quiet with burnt-out houses and abandoned tower blocks. “It’s going back to the prairie – these houses are just disappearing back into the landscape,” as a reporter put it in the award-winning 2012 documentary Detropia. What went wrong? In 1903, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company, and Detroit soon became the world’s biggest manufacturer of cars. The Ford Rouge factory could hold 90,000 assembly line staff, and people flooded in for work. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, the number of car manufacturers in the city fell from 18 to the Big Three – Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. Then there was the Second World War, strikes provoked by racial tensions, the automation of production lines and competition from the Far East. The global economic crisis struck in 2007. General Motors and Chrysler went under in 2009. Ford struggled through, while companies such as American Axle fell in 2012. A scene in Detropia shows George McGregor, president of Local 22 United Auto Workers union, breaking news of devastating pay cuts: “For factory support, which is the guys that are making US$14.35, the new proposal is US$11 an hour.” Bosses reportedly said: “I don’t care about your guys having a liveable wage. This is what we need to keep Detroit viable.” A FRESH START I land in the city on June 11, 2015, flying in on one of Virgin Atlantic’s new daily services from London Heathrow. The only UK carrier operating direct, not only is it designed to feed traffic through the US’s third-largest gateway to the rest of the Midwest via its partner Delta, but also bring airlift to an urban centre that is, literally, rising from the ashes. A sad symptom of economic collapse and low morale, arson has been “a raging epidemic” in Detroit. According to detroitnews.com, last year there were almost 4,000 “suspicious fires”, and the authorities have found it hard to keep up with demolition work. Some neighbourhoods are beginning to look better, though, in part down to local billionaire Dan Gilbert – founder of “America’s largest online mortgage lender”, Quicken Loans – who is putting money into revitalising suburban areas as well as the city centre. So far he has bought more than 75 properties in Downtown at a cost of US$1.7 billion, and relocated 12,500 of his employees from Quicken Loans, casino empire Rock Gaming and property valuation company Title Source. According to Detroit News, six years ago, 48 of the city’s largest office blocks were vacant, but more than 30 of those are now occupied or being redeveloped. Another billionaire saviour is the Ilitch family, which made its fortune from Little Caesar’s Pizza, and owns the Detroit Tigers baseball team and MotorCity Casino hotel. Michael, Marian and son Chris are investing US$650 million in a new entertainment zone called District Detroit (districtdetroit.com) with apartments, restaurants, bars, shops and parks, as well as a 20,000-seat hockey arena for the Detroit Red Wings, which they also own. Spanning 50 blocks between Midtown and Downtown, it is expected to generate US$1.8 billion in the short term, and is due to be completed in 2017. COMEBACK CITY Walking through Downtown, it feels quiet when compared with other cities. There are lots of brown-brick towers either empty – their exteriors canvases for street art – or repurposed as car parks. Still, life is rippling through. The Cobo Centre for conventions has undergone a US$299 million revamp, while last December, Starwood opened an Aloft hotel in the art deco David Whitney Building. It has 136 rooms, some overlooking the monorail that encircles Downtown in a 4.6km loop, and amenities include free wifi, rainshowers and coffee-to-go. Since 2013, more than 70 restaurants have opened. David Lorenz, vice-president of Travel Michigan at the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, says: “This renaissance is awesome to watch. What Detroit is going through is like what East Berlin went through with unification. We have buildings that should have been torn down long ago but weren’t, and, as it turns out, that was lucky as Detroit is now this treasure trove of architecture.” Next year, the number of workers in Downtown is expected to reach 100,000, compared with 78,000 in 2010. Forbes says: “Five years ago the city had no venture capitalists and no start-ups.” Today, the picture is very different. Entrepreneurs – many of them in tech – are setting up in Downtown, while Gilbert is taking on more than 1,000 interns. Low property prices are also attracting young creative types. “All of this is helping the comeback,” says Larry Alexander, president and CEO of the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau. “About every hundred years, Detroit has reinvented itself. First it was the fur traders, then it was automotive. Now there is this groundswell – it is civilian-led.” Lorenz says: “Detroit has a spirit of innovation – it is in the DNA.” Ford kick-started the car industry, but the city is also the home of Motown music. “These innovators were always looking for a better way of doing things,” he says. “You find people who are developing their own businesses because when there were no jobs, they had to, and now they are becoming very profitable.” Mayor Mike Duggan says: “I am 56 and the population of Detroit has dropped every year I have been alive, but we are now seeing for the first time people pouring back into the city.” Lorenz agrees: “It’s getting more expensive – you can feel this energy. Downtown is this redeveloping giant but in the region there are also some incredibly wealthy communities.” I take a boat trip down the Detroit River, which divides the US from Canada on the far shore, and after 15km get off at Grosse Pointe, where scandalously huge mansions compete for attention. The great-grandson of Henry Ford lives here, while it was the setting for Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides and 1997 comedy film Grosse Point Blank. START-UP SUCCESS “You heard about Shinola, right?” Lorenz says. “It’s a watch and bicycle store, handmade in Detroit. They made 50,000 watches last year, with the cheapest selling for US$500. Their concept was: ‘We have all these makers in Detroit, so let’s bring them all together.’ It’s a phenomenal success story.” The Virgin Atlantic flight doesn’t just have journalists on board, but Richard Branson, who hosts a live pitching session at Detroit’s College of Creative Studies. There are four start-ups – two furniture companies (Floyd and Ali Sandifer), a fashion brand (Merit) that uses profits to help students go to college, and Original Stix, which turns broken hockey sticks into iPhone cases. Branson says: “Entrepreneurs are the future of the city and they need to be encouraged. It’s fantastic to see the amount of new companies setting up, and that is going to drive Detroit forward.” Also on the panel is Dan Gilbert, event producer Adriel Thornton, and Shinola chief marketing officer Bridget Russo. She says: “We now have nine stores, but our Detroit store continues to beat our New York one by three times daily. People underestimate the city.” Detroit returned from bankruptcy last December, but as Mayor Duggan was reported as saying in The New York Times: “How do you deliver service in a city where the unemployment rate is double the state average, and we’ve got to rebuild a water system and a bus system and a computer system and a financial system? It’s all going to be a challenge.” FREE WHEELING For a place that isn’t a top tourist destination, it has a surprising amount to do, and visitor numbers are rising – last year, more than 14 million came. You can stop by the Motown Museum, the 1920s Fillmore Theatre or the working Ford Rouge Factory, watch hip-hop at dive bar Old Miami or jazz at Cliff Bell’s, and see the car that JFK was assassinated in at the Henry Ford Museum. At the weekend, Detroiters flock to Eastern Market, a series of 150-year-old warehouses filled with hundreds of stalls selling flowers and fresh produce. There’s also an art gallery run by Red Bull and a micro distillery. Outside are food trucks and barbecues grilling slabs of steak and ribs; inside, a guy is selling bags of Detroit Bold coffee, the profits of which will go to building community cafés. Down the road, a man is campaigning for better public transport. He says: “Detroit is a city built on cars so what we have come to realise is all we have is a bunch of five-lane highways and no other way of getting around. We want to introduce a way of getting people in from the suburbs who haven’t got a car.” The M1-Rail streetcar project, which will be complete next year, should help. Meanwhile, a group has gathered on the new waterfront for the Slow Roll weekly bike ride. Once again, wheels are getting the city moving. The collective was started five years ago by Jason Hall and Mike MacKool to get people exploring new neighbourhoods, and has grown from a handful of cyclists to thousands, many of whom decorate their bikes with strings of coloured lights when they roll through the night. Last year, Apple made Hall the star of one of its iPad adverts. In it, he says: “We started Slow Roll because we wanted to show Detroit in a positive light to help repopulate it. The core of it was about reconnecting – if one person showed up every week, that’s all we needed. It went from 130 to 300 in two weeks. This season we hit 2,000 – that was when I knew something crazy and something good was happening in the city.” Pedalling behind Branson, who is on a bright red Shinola bike, we ride past people fishing and doing yoga. Later, we stop for baked goods and coffee at Sister Pie and Parker Street Market, trendy stores that didn’t exist two years ago. Excited by a famous face, the staff stop to take photos. He shakes them all by the hand and congratulates them on their work. “Detroit will be one of the great cities of America once again,” he says. I have no doubt about that.
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