Fast Company asks: Could an inch save Detroit?

There are a lot of bottom-up things happening around town these days. Whether is urban ag or Toby Barlow writing something in the New York Times, Detroit has a lot going on. None probably more interesting than selling the city to people inch by inch.

Excerpt from Fast Company:

What to do? Well, you could farm it, like John Hantz is proposing. But as Greg Lindsay pointed out here, that might not be the best idea: "With 95% of its remaining buildings still inhabitable, inner-city Detroit should at least be an urban Petri dish."

It should be, it can be, and it is. Design99 and Motor City boosters like Toby Barlow are advocating saving those houses--and the city--by buying them up cheap (super cheap) and fixing them into homes for artists, locals, or transplants.

Then there's Loveland, Jerry Paffendorf's "wild social network of people, literally built out of the dirt." Paffendorf bought a vacant lot for $500 and sold it, an inch at a time for $1 per inch, to almost 600 "inchvestors" around the world. It's called Plymouth (pictured above).

Now, Loveland is in phase 2. Paffendorf doesn't have a new lot to sell, so he's selling so-called "ghost inches" in order to raise money to fund any number of as-yet unspecified, but sure to be... uh... interesting projects on-line and throughout the city. You can inchvest through kickstarter here.

Read the entire article here.