Detroit In The News

Ryan South searched the suburbs for a first place to call his own but found what he wanted in Detroit's Garden Court.

Excerpt:

Ryan South, 25, looked at about 150 houses for sale on Metro Detroit's eastside before he realized what he really coveted.

"I grew up in Grosse Pointe, and Jefferson Avenue was always my main drag," says South, director of mortgage banking for Quicken Loans and a 2005 graduate of Central Michigan University, where he studied business administration. "So when I decided to buy my first place, it finally occurred to me that a condominium on Jefferson made perfect sense."

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Southwest Detroit's Whitdel apartment building got new life through art and artists, thanks to Southwest Solutions and CAID.

Excerpt:

After buying the Whitdel, Southwest Solutions asked the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit to help restore the building. The exchange led to a partnership. CAID now uses the 1,500-square-foot Ladybug Gallery in the basement for exhibitions, including video art, sculpture, paintings and drawings. A ceramic studio will provide art education and workshops to neighborhood children and other residents.

CAID also makes tenant referrals. Whitdel is open to anyone with an income of no more than 60% of the area median, or $29,300 for a single person. But Southwest Solutions seeks painters, musicians, writers, sculptors and other artists. They now occupy 10 of the units and make the place special.

When I first walked into the lobby last month, tenant Gerald Butler, a 53-year-old flutist, was playing "Amazing Grace." He played it from the heart. For the first time in his adult life, he has a real home.

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Dwell Magazine, a modern architecture and design magazine, came to Detroit's Lafayette Park to check out Mies van der Rohe's work.

Excerpt:

Residents Keira Alexandra and Toby Barlow are two of Lafayette Park’s (and downtown Detroit’s) most fervent supporters. “San Francisco doesn’t need us,” says Alexandra, a graphic designer, “but Detroit does.” Barlow, who is the executive creative director for the Ford account at JWT and author of the epic poem Sharp Teeth, wryly notes, “Detroit is a blank canvas waiting for some more visionaries like Mies. People describe it as being dangerous, but they don’t describe Malibu as being dangerous, and it’s always on fire. That seems pretty dangerous to me. And Arizona is always on the brink of running out of water. That seems dangerous too.”

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Detroit is moving closer and closer to rapid transit as transit bills move through the house.

Excerpt:

The bills allow the Michigan Department of Transportation to establish a “transit development finance zone” within one mile of the railway system and through multiple municipalities to capture future increases in property taxes for railway operations.

Other legislation permits an annual state appropriation to pay for what the system’s revenues and tax increment funding don’t fund.

There are currently two Woodward transit plans, one a privately funded $103 million project and the other a $372 million proposal by the Detroit Department of Transportation, that are expected to merge in 2009.

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DDOT wants to know what you think of their new signs. You have until Nov. 21 to take their survey and tell them.

See the signs here. Take the survey here.



In other Detroit bussing news: Due to increased ridership of SMART buses, customer service hours have been expanded. You can now call on Saturdays between 7:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. The number is (866) 962-551.

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With Detroit's automakers possibly going out to pasture, it's suggested that they flip their production from automobiles to transportation and mass transit manufacturing. It could be their savior, and the city's, too.

Excerpt:

But Mr. Udall recognized that the country could not afford the economic consequences of losing all of the automobile industry’s jobs and profits. He proposed that the auto companies branch out into “exciting new variants of ground transportation” to produce minibuses, “people movers,” urban mass transit and high-speed intercity trains. Instead of expanding the Interstate highway system, he suggested that the road construction industry take on “huge new programs to construct mass transit systems.” And he called for building “more compact, sensitively planned communities” rather than continuing urban sprawl.

As we now know, warnings like these went unheeded, and Americans became ever more car-dependent. And now, the auto industry is asking for government money that promises, even with more fuel-efficient cars, to give us more of the same. Instead of supporting companies that want to put as many cars on the road as possible, we need a transformational strategy.

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The third Wednesday of every month Detroit Abides screens a movie at Eastern Market and it's FREE. This month's installment is "The Future of Food."

Excerpt:

THE FUTURE OF FOOD offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade.

From the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada to the fields of Oaxaca, Mexico, this film gives a voice to farmers whose lives and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by this new technology. The health implications, government policies and push towards globalization are all part of the reason why many people are alarmed by the introduction of genetically altered crops into our food supply.

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New York Times writer decides to spend election night in Detroit.

Excerpt:

After driving down Woodward Avenue, we dropped Marian’s Explorer at our hotel, then walked to Harmonie Park, a small, recently gentrified, triangular neighborhood near the baseball stadium.

At Lola’s, our favorite restaurant, the headwaiter said he felt like a kid on Christmas Eve, giddy with anticipation but afraid that he might wake up and be disappointed. A customer said she was on pins and needles, and her friend expressed the hope that Barack Obama would improve the country’s image abroad and “not just help the rich but the people who are really struggling.” An older man in gold earrings and a porkpie hat who owns a chain of art galleries ventured that an Obama presidency would give Detroit “a psychological uplift.”

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Detroit Public Television will air a new documentary by local Oscar-winning filmmaker Sue Marx on Nov. 28.  The film focuses on Math Crops, a math camp held every summer at Wayne State University for Detroit Public School students between seventh and 12th grades.

Excerpt:

Math Corps draws its students from Detroit Public Schools. If the camp can fire up the minds of hundreds of them for 16 straight summers, shouldn't a version of this program be in every DPS school by now?

"The Math Corps from the beginning has never been about math," Kahn says in the film. "This is a program that was born out of just looking around in the city in which we live and work and seeing just tremendous injustice, tremendous sadness; as people we felt we needed to do something about this."

That's the mind-set Detroiters ought to demand from their school leaders.

"Caring about kids is something that I don't see as my monopoly," Kahn says. "There are plenty of people who can do this."

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Places like Henry the Hatter, Mercury Coffe Bar, People's Records, John King Books, and Good Girls Go to Paris Crepes are just a few Detroit businesses on the rise.

The Detroit News looks at businesses -- old and new -- that are thriving in the city.

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