It is just one small sign of how far Detroit’s fortunes have fallen: the birthplace of the mass-produced automobile, the city that gave us the infuriating, bumper-to-bumper commute, is now so sparsely populated that it doesn’t have a rush hour.
Dan Gilbert would like to change that. No, he’s not interested in a honking pileup of S.U.V.’s. Mr. Gilbert, 51, a Detroit native and the fantastically wealthy founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, wants to revive two square miles that were once the thrumming heart of this city. To do so, he has already spent roughly $1 billion acquiring nearly three million square feet of real estate, and is ready to close another deal, for the Greektown Casino-Hotel and nearby parking lots, that will add one million more square feet to his holdings.
His real estate company, Bedrock Real Estate Services, is renovating properties, building apartments and wooing corporate tenants. A seven-mile light rail system is in the planning stages, underwritten by a number of businesses and business leaders, including Mr. Gilbert, as well as foundations and a federal grant.
Along with his employees, civic groups and public-spaces gurus, he is devising strategies to “activate” streets with outdoor seating and ground-level retail stores. Taxpayers will kick in a yet-to-be-determined sum for parts of this rehabilitation program, but it will be a fraction of what Mr. Gilbert contributes.
His plans, according to academics like Brent D. Ryan, author of “Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities,” amount to one of the most ambitious privately financed urban reclamation projects in American history.
Opportunity Detroit, as Mr. Gilbert has branded it, is both a rescue mission and a business venture that, if successful, will yield him a fortune. When he started buying in 2011, the city was having what he has described as a “skyscraper sale.” Among the bargains was the Dime Building, a 23-story neo-Classical gem of glazed brick and terra cotta trim, designed by Daniel Burnham — of Flatiron Building fame — and completed in 1912. In August 2011, Bedrock bought all 330,000 square feet of it, reportedly for $15 million. There are high-end apartments in Manhattan that cost more.
If this area turns around, no one will profit quite like Mr. Gilbert, but the risk looks as great as the potential reward. Even with its auto industry in relatively robust, post-bailout health, Detroit has been on a long, distressing slide. A quarter of its population left in the last decade, and it has $14 billion in long-term debt. The financial situation is so dire that Michigan’s governor recently appointed an emergency manager. Detroit remains a national symbol of municipal decline, a victim of macroeconomic trends, poor planning and political corruption.
Mr. Gilbert is undaunted. Part-owner of a handful of casinos, he is familiar with big bets and steep odds, and, as they say in poker, he is all in. In 2010, he started moving his employees from a nearby suburb, and 7,600 people on his payroll now work downtown.
“Not a single one of them has told me, ‘I don’t want to be here,’ ” he said in a recent interview in his office next to downtown’s Campus Martius Park, formerly among the city’s busiest gathering points and a focus of his campaign. “Kids coming out of college want that urban core excitement, more and more.”
DRESSED in a red-checked button-down shirt and a blue blazer, Mr. Gilbert is 5 feet 5 inches of restless energy. He has slicked-back dark hair, a Hollywood smile and dolorous eyes that give him the look of a man in need of sleep. Growing up in Southfield, a nearby suburb, he spent little time in the city. One of his earliest memories is of his father, who owned a nightclub-restaurant in the city, explaining the Detroit riots as the violence unfolded over five days in 1967, leaving more than 40 people dead and 2,500 stores burned or looted.
It was a searing moment in the city’s history, one that highlighted racial disparities that still haunt Detroit.
“People my age, we would hear from our parents and grandparents who were raised in Detroit about how great this city was, from 1900 to the 60s,” Mr. Gilbert said. “But none of us had any memory of that. And it wasn’t until my late 20s and early 30s, when I started traveling for business, to places like New York City and Los Angeles, that I realized how much we were missing. As I started visiting these great American cities, it hit me — man, how did we blow this so badly?”
He seems to consider it his duty to rebuild what a previous generation allowed to fall apart. He aims to turn downtown into a high-tech hub, where young entrepreneurs both live and work. (He and a handful of companies are offering rent and mortgage subsidies to people willing to live downtown.) These pioneers will have easy access to high culture: the city’s leading museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Opera House are nearby, as are stadiums for the city’s professional baseball and football teams.
About 80 small companies have already settled into buildings owned by Bedrock, many of them start-ups funded by Detroit Venture Partners, a venture capital firm co-owned by Mr. Gilbert. A Twitter office is here, too, as is a branch of Uber, the online taxi-calling service. National brands, like Nike, are being courted.
A master salesman, Mr. Gilbert describes a reinvigorated downtown as though it is inevitable, but there are more than a few skeptics. They include Mr. Ryan, who teaches in the department of urban studies and planning at M.I.T.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/business/dan-gilberts-quest-to-remake-downtown-detroit.html?partner=rss&emc=rss