Ren Cen’s Urban Science joins Live Downtown push

Urban Science, one of the best-kept growing businesses in the Renaissance Center, is offering its own Live Downtown incentives, offering cash subsidies to its employees to live in the greater downtown area.

"Detroit has always been home to us," says Matthew Bejin, global director of recruiting and staffing at Urban Science. "We believe that there is a rebirth here."

Urban Science is a retail consulting firm that provides analysis for a variety of different retailers. The company has developed software programs that create analysis on a business's customers, its retail location and what it can do to improve the performance of both, among other things. It has called the Ren Cen home since it opened in 1977. It employs 750 people worldwide, including about 300 people in downtown Detroit. That’s up from 280 a year ago.

Live Downtown is a rental and home-buying program modeled after the Live Midtown, which was started by Wayne State University, Detroit Medical Center and Henry Ford Hospital last year. A number of major downtown corporations and institutions, including DTE Energy and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, started Live Downtown last summer. The program offers a sizable rental and home-buying subsidy to employees of these businesses to live in Detroit’s Central Business District and surrounding neighborhoods, such as Midtown, New Center, Corktown and Woodbridge.

Bejin says Urban Science is taking part in the Live Downtown-style housing incentives push because the firm considers it an out-of-the-box idea to improve the city, and Urban Science wants to be a stronger participant in the city’s rebirth. It also will make the company a more attractive place to work for top talent.

"We have lost a lot of students to places with cooler downtown, urban settings," Bejin says

Source: Matthew Bejin, global director of recruiting and staffing at Urban Science
Writer: Jon Zemke

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