Does multimillion dollar Chinese investment signal Detroit’s rebirth?
The 302,000-square-foot Detroit Free Press building, abandoned since 1998, has fallen into an advanced state of disrepair. Photograph: Jonathan Kaiman
Last autumn, a group of Chinese real estate developers arrived in downtown Detroit for a city tour. As they walked through its small central cluster of high-rises – some in use, many long-ago abandoned – they were impressed by what they saw. Amid the urban decay, they were shown art spaces, colourful tech startup offices, and other testaments to reinvention. “Rebirth of Detroit” read one elaborately-stencilled mural. Wedged into an empty window frame of a crumbling mid-rise, a wood block carving depicted an Atlas-like figure hoisting a giant ‘D’ on his shoulders. “Rising from the ashes,” it said.
In September, the Shanghai-based developer Dongdu International (DDI) made its first move. In an online auction, it snapped up three iconic downtown properties, all built during the city’s early 20th-century heyday as an industrial powerhouse. DDI purchased the David Stott building, a 38-storey art-deco skyscraper built in 1929, and the former Detroit Free Press newspaper headquarters, a T-shaped edifice adorned with bas-relief sculptures of biplanes and locomotives. Later, it acquired the 10-storey Clark Lofts, an inconspicuous residential building with a manual, pre-second world war elevator – the oldest in Detroit.
Altogether, DDI spent $16.4m (£9.6m) on the properties, slightly more than a top-market apartment in Shanghai.
The company plans to transform the buildings into vibrant offices and upscale apartments, according to the CEO of DDI’s leisure branch, Peter Wood. “Once we’ve shown to the locals in Detroit that we’re deadly serious, then other things will happen,” Wood says, sitting in his corner office on the 10th floor of a Shanghai skyscraper, a dozen or so Chinese employees typing diligently in cubicles outside. “Detroit is planning for this area to come back. It’s all about rejuvenation.”
Detroit demolishes its ruins: 'The capitalists will take care of the rest'
Detroit is knocking down 200 houses a week, with 40,000 to go and $1bn in the program. The city’s controversial plan aims to bring more wealthy investors but critics say will drive out black residents.
That would hardly excite most city dwellers, but Colvin doesn’t live in just any city. She lives in Detroit, where municipal neglect has become customary. Detroit has been the unwitting star of a photo subgenre christened “ruin porn”, with fans in all corners of the world – except in its native hometown. Two years ago – the same year Forbes named Detroit the most dangerous city in America – local media reported that abandoned homes had become dumping grounds for dead bodies.
Good riddance to that, say residents.
Reclaim Detroit finds city's treasures in abandoned homes
James Cadariu was planning construction of his hip, new coffee bar, Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Company, in 2011 when he first heard about Reclaim Detroit, a nonprofit agency retrieving old and valuable wood and other treasures from Detroit homes set for demolition.
It sounded like material he could use at the coffeehouse he was fashioning on Woodward Avenue in Midtown Detroit.
When he eventually made his way to Reclaim Detroit's warehouse, then located at Focus: HOPE, he was delighted with what he found, stacks of rare, old-forest lumber, hand-carved mahogany doors and antique fixtures, some of it more than a hundred years old.
And something more personal — wood taken from a home on Grayton Street on the city's east side, two doors down from his uncle's house, where he used to visit as a child.
Majestic Building - Demolition photos
Dan Gilbert, the 51-year-old billionaire who made national headlines for his work transforming downtown Detroit, has a lofty new goal: to tear down the nearly 80,000 abandoned buildings that plague Motor City. All at once.
According to Gilbert, ridding Detroit of run-down structures is an all or nothin’ job. “Getting down all these homes that are blighted and commercial, what we need to do is just stop incrementalizing it,” the Quicken Loans chairman told reporters. “The problem is if you incrementalize this stuff then other people are willing to leave their homes and create more and more blight.”
Detroit hosts an estimated 78,000 commercial and residential buildings, a decades-long problem due to people fleeing the city for the suburbs. City officials were so desperate to fix the problem in 2012 that they offered homes that didn’t sell at auction for $500. Sounds like they need to think of more creative ways to keep people around. There’s not much anyone can do with $500 windowless crack house.
To put Detroit’s population drop into perspective, there were 1,849,546 people living in the city in 1950 compared to a little over 700,000 today.
DYI
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