Small Business Saturday, nestled between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, puts the spotlight on the nation's 28 million shops along Main Street. Maria Contreras-Sweet, administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration explains the vital role small businesses play in local communities and how companies like Uber and American Express are providing incentives for consumers to shop small.I hope Trump finds someone at least half as competent to take her position. As competent? Sorry, I'm too realistic.
A gargantuan 3-year plan: 5 new neighborhoods, a $450 million hockey arena and an accelerated timeline to complete it allI'd noticed the large vacant expanses between Foxtown and Midtown and wondered what would become of them. Now I know. I'm looking forward to seeing it completed, just in time for the M1 light rail to serve it.**
A DRAMATIC TRANSFORMATION OF THE HEART OF DETROIT will begin in September, when the Ilitch family breaks ground on the construction of a $450 million Detroit Red Wings arena concurrently with another $200 million in apartments, restaurants, office buildings, parks and shops over 45 blocks. This is the city’s entertainment district, super-sized.
Planned is a gargantuan three-year construction project to create five new neighborhoods intended to stitch together the city where it’s divided by the trench-like Fisher Freeway underneath Woodward Avenue.
The 650,000-square-foot hockey and events center and the new neighborhoods — including hundreds of apartments to be built both outside Comerica Park and the new hockey arena — are scheduled to be ready by summer 2017.
The former Detroit Science Center will announce its reopening date next week.That's for the permanent opening. The Science Center will also be open this Saturday as part of Noel Night, as Crain's Detroit Business reported a week before Thanksgiving.
Renamed and reorganized as the Michigan Science Center, the long-dormant venue will open “sooner rather than later,” said Shelly Otenbaker, a board member who has been serving as a spokesperson for the museum, which closed amid financial problems in September 2011. Otenbaker would not discuss specifics.
The date will be revealed at a Tuesday news media event, and museum officials will also discuss issues related to staffing, fund-raising and programming, Otenbaker said.
On its Facebook page Monday, the institution formerly known as the Detroit Science Center said Noel Night will give people the opportunity to get a "sneak peek" before it officially reopens.The Michigan Science Center won't be alone in being open this Saturday.
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The science center will be open 5-9 p.m. on Noel Night, offering access to hands-on exhibits, entertainment and other special activities.
Noel Night, scheduled for Dec. 1, will feature open houses at more than 60 venues in Midtown between Cass and John R and Kirby and Willis.So, who's responsible for the Michigan Science Center reopening? Crain's Detroit Business has the answer to that, too.
Among those opening their doors to the public that night are the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the Detroit Historical Museum and the Detroit Public Library.
There also will be horse-drawn carriage rides, shopping, crafts, performances by more than 120 local music, theater and dance groups, and shuttle service between venues, all free.
The organization told Crain's in September that it had raised a little more than $2.5 million toward its $5 million goal. The DTE Energy Foundation's $250,000 commitment was publicly announced in mid-October, following gifts from others including the Ford Foundation, General Motors Foundation, ITC Holdings Corp., Lear Corp., Alex and Marie Manoogian Foundation and Penske Corp.I wish more Republicans were like the Weisers. If they were, I might still be one of them.
Additionally, the science center's white knight — Ron Weiser, founder of McKinley Associates Inc. in Ann Arbor, national finance chairman for the Republican National Committee and former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party —indicated that he and his wife, Eileen Lappin Weiser, a member of the Michigan Board of Education, planned to make an additional gift to the center.
Weiser, a former U.S. ambassador to Slovakia, this summer acquired the science center's debt from Citizens Bank of Flint for "significantly less" than the roughly $6.2 million owed, saving its building and assets from being sold to the highest bidder at a public auction. He said at the time that he planned to sell the building and its contents back to the science center board for less than the amount he acquired it for, minus legal fees and closing costs.
[T]here will not be a Kroger on Main Street in Royal Oak.Whole Foods has other plans that don't involve Royal Oak, but Plan B has materialized.
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Time for plan B. I wonder if Whole Foods is interested in buying a $3.5 million dollar property and complying with Royal Oak's master plan?
A real estate brokerage representing Fresard Investments LP is shopping plans for an eight-story hotel in Royal Oak to the city's Downtown Development Authority to gauge its interest in the project.Here's what it looks like.
Southfield-based CBRE Group Inc. is working with Fresard on plans for the site. Preliminary plans, submitted to the DDA to provide context for a discussion at its Wednesday meeting, call for redevelopment of the former Jim Fresard Pontiac-Buick-GMC auto dealership at 400 N. Main St.
Plans also include a banquet facility and five-story mixed-use development with apartments and retail.
While census workers did their job we did ours: produced ideas, converting them into real action. Detroit's creative juices have been flowing over the past decade. Managing editor Walter Wasacz says hang on, this is just the beginning of a long, wild ride into the unknown."A long, wild ride into the unknown"--and that's exactly what we're all embarking on, whether we live in Detroit, Los Angeles, or anywhere else in the world, including the readers from Canada, Australia, India, China, the Russian Republic, or Yemen who have stopped by this past week. Yes, folks, I see you. The difference is that Detroit knows this, even if the rest of you don't, and we're likely to arrive at the future first. As I'm fond of typing out, "Welcome to Detroit, Ground Zero of the post-industrial future."
When the census numbers for Detroit were released late last month -- not good numbers, as we all know; horrible numbers, in fact -- no one in my heavily Detroit-centric world panicked. Quite the opposite happened. Every conversation I had about it spun the statistical information on its head, taking the news not as a foreshadowing of the city's decline and fall (as did national media en masse, including the cynically misinformed Wall Street Journal and even the usually on-target New York Times, whose reporter appeared to seek out only the most dour, hysterical and self-loathing among us for reaction quotes) but as validation of what many of us have been doing for the past decade in a place where vast open space -- physical, psychological, psychogeographical -- was growing before our eyes.Walter is a
Doing what, exactly? Cobbling together ideas, converting them into action, quickly; filling in the gaps, making dots, connecting dots, pouring foundations, taking risks; discarding old models that don't work, finding new models, engaging urban life on various fronts, catalyzing neighborhood and community life; having fun on top it all.
On this level of furious engagement, the Detroit of the first decade of the new century became for the first time in my memory that most coveted of urbanist dreams: a 24 hour city...Different, twisted, character-rich, unique. Without aspiration to be anything but Detroit itself.Now, that's not my dream of Detroit, but it is an exciting one. It certainly will draw in the people from other big cities who want to settle what has become an urban frontier. The revival of the City of Detroit proper isn't going to come from suburbanites moving back into the city, not at first. It's going to come from trendsetters from outside discovering the place--and they're already starting.
But we are simply traveling at incredible speed -- the fastest and most interesting spurts of ground-up growth in my lifetime have occurred in the past 10 years -- in exploring multiple new narratives that have little to do with the ersatz Motor City. Seeds for the economic diversity we've craved but never had are being planted. Creative entrepreneurship is being rewarded. Discussion of mass transit has passed from the imaginary to the real. Detroit as the non-motorized city, a pedestrian utopia for cyclist and walkers? Well, yes, it's on the cusp.A couple of years ago, I ran into a fellow in Buffalo Wild Wings in Brighton, that outpost of people who fled Detroit and hate what it has become, but who have perversely managed to turn Livingston County, the fastest growing large county in the state for four decades running, into the farthest west part of the Detroit Metropolitan Statistical Area. Sorry, former neighbors, you left Detroit and ended up bringing it with you. Anyway, he found out that I was from California and wondered why I live here. That's really a long story, but to make it short, I tell him that Michigan in general and metro Detroit in particular has more environmental promise than problems, while California in general and Los Angeles in particular has more environmental problems than promise. Walter seems to agree.
It feels good, it is good, but think of it as just the launchpad in getting to the elusive tipping point. The best news to scrape from Detroit's premature obituary is that there is plenty of work to go around, for all who want to jump in and grab a piece of the unknown. No over-saturation of anything (or anyone) anywhere in sight, your desire matched by the results of over 300 years of doers, growers and innovators. Where better to make your claim on history than here?As I tell my students, great things are going to happen here, and they're going to happen here first. Whatever Detroit devises as the solutions for North America's problems will be exported to the rest of the continent. It's an exciting time to live here, and I wouldn't miss it for the world.
Employers, the city and private foundations zeroing in on Detroit's Midtown neighborhood to lure new residents to the city may have a secret weapon in their arsenal: Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods Market Inc.If you had asked me last week which major supermarket chain would have been the first to come into Detroit, the last chain I would have expected would have been Whole Foods. Instead, I was expecting it to be Meijer, which is slated to open a store in the old State Fairgrounds area on Woodward and 8 Mile. Looks like I was wrong.
Crain's has learned that the grocery chain, known for its organic produce and above-average prices, is shopping for space in Midtown.
Sue Mosey, president of newly created Midtown Detroit Inc., a nonprofit encompassing the former University Cultural Center Association and New Center Council Inc., confirmed last week: "There has been some expressed interest by Whole Foods in looking at the possibility of a store in Midtown."
On Wednesday, Mayor Dave Bing went one better. At a private lunch meeting of young professionals and corporate supporters of talent attraction efforts in Detroit, Bing said the deal with Whole Foods was getting close.
"It's not a question of "if' but "when,' " he told an attendee in a side conversation.
