“It’s happening here”: Detroit’s renaissance takes shape after decades of decadence | Detroit

When the Book Cadillac Hotel opened in Detroit a century ago this month, it crowned the Motor City as one of the most dominant metropolitan powers on the planet.

At the time, the world’s tallest hotel had more than 1,100 rooms spread over 31 floors. At the time, Detroit was a place where everyone wanted to see or be seen, as the city’s dominant industry – the automobile – fueled the dawn of mass mobility for the rest of the world.

While the decades since have been less kind, Detroit today finds itself in the midst of a resurgence.

At the recently opened Newlab technology center, once an abandoned book repository for the city school system, robots move across bare concrete floors. Outside, the swirl of an electric mountain bike fills the streets. Inside the building, more than 100 startups are working to imagine the future of mobility.

While a century ago immigrants from Syria, Poland and Ireland disembarked at the nearby Michigan Central Station, today entrepreneurs and engineers from Mexico, Norway and elsewhere get off in the city.

Many chose to come to Detroit rather than Boston, Silicon Valley or Austin because a new wave of innovation – and $700 million in investment from Ford Motor Company, municipal tax breaks and money from other investors – are helping to breathe new life into a place that, for now, has served for so long as an example of the death of the American city.

Livaq, a startup founded by David Medina, a 26-year-old Mexican entrepreneur, is developing electric off-road vehicles that will reduce both air and noise pollution in urban environments. Norwegian company wheel.me promises to turn any object into a robot capable of autonomously moving huge objects and is working with some of Detroit’s leading automakers.

“When we wanted to expand into the American market, Siemens, one of our main customers, had a huge base in Atlanta, so there was a desire to set up there,” explains Robert Skinner, originally from Detroit and US Managing Director of EcoG. , an electric vehicle charging technology company headquartered in Munich.

“But when the team came to the Detroit auto show, they saw the recovery, everything that’s happening – it’s the buzz here. We had a one-on-one meeting with the governor… All of that helped make the decision to move here.

Just a decade ago, General Motors was bankrupt, and with $18 billion in debt, the city was cash-strapped, becoming the largest U.S. city to go bankrupt. Its emergency services were closed as over the decades about 700,000 residents left the city and its ever-growing list of problems.

Throughout this period, the imposing Michigan Central building and the nearby Old Book Depository served as reminders of both Detroit’s grand, distant past and its more recent decline.

In 2018, the Ford Motor Company purchased the 90-acre site for $90 million and has since dedicated 1.7 million hours of work involving thousands of craftsmen to restore this magnificent classic Beaux Arts building to its original state. ancient glory.

“At its peak (in the 1940s), 4,000 people passed through Michigan Central every day (taking trains to and from Detroit),” says Michigan Central CEO Josh Sirefman.

“Recently, 4,000 people came to reuse the building. There is a kind of poetry in that. It’s a major statement about things coming back to life.

The area’s renaissance was marked by a concert last summer where thousands of tickets to see artists such as Detroit natives Diana Ross and Eminem were snapped up within hours.

As the nation’s largest majority-Black city, efforts to foster minority-led innovation have been part of the revival story.

In the spring of 2023, Alexa Turnage and her husband, Johnnie, founded Black Tech Saturdays after learning that Black founders and entrepreneurs in tech “don’t exist.”

“We would start here at 10 a.m. on Saturday, and by 5 p.m. people were still arriving and looking to get involved,” Johnnie says.

Since then, the organization has hosted dozens of workshops and networking events to support local and national Black tech communities from their base in Central Michigan.

“Our biggest milestone was when we welcomed a female founder last March. About 1,200 people came. We took over three floors of this building.

Hundreds of high school students also completed Google’s Code Next program, an effort also housed at Michigan Central.

It’s not just Michigan Central that’s experiencing a revival.

A decade ago, most of downtown Detroit’s skyscrapers were derelict or derelict. Today, each has been renovated in different states and all are occupied again.

The recovery of the Book Tower, a 38-story Renaissance-style building, is particularly satisfying for many.

“It is difficult to overstate the extent of the damage caused to the building. It was a combination of deterioration — stone panels were falling off walls, painted glass ceilings were falling — and damage,” says Jamie Witherspoon of Bedrock, a real estate company owned by Dan Gilbert, the Detroit billionaire who owns Rocket Mortgage and the NBA’s Cleveland. Riders.

Bedrock’s central project over the past decade has been bringing the Book Tower back to life.

The building sat vacant for six years before Gilbert and his team stepped in with deep pockets to readapt the old office tower into 21st century palaces.

Last year, and nearly $400 million later, it opened as a stunning mixed-use space with five restaurants, hundreds of apartments, 117 extended-stay suites and dozens of caryatids overlooking life in a resurgent city center. Architectural Digest magazine named it one of the most beautiful converted buildings in the world.

“We saw this as an opportunity, on some level, to take what had been a model of urban decay and make it a place where lots of different people can come and experience,” says Witherspoon.

However, the city faces major challenges.

Poverty in Detroit is nearly three times the national average, while soaring housing costs in gentrifying neighborhoods have upended the lives of some residents.

When General Motors recently asked the city of Detroit to provide $250 million to help renovate its iconic RenCen skyscrapers, some resident groups balked.

But the city’s upward trajectory is undeniable.

On land next to Michigan Central, Detroit City FC hopes to build a new stadium near the Mexicantown neighborhood, a community from which the soccer team draws much of its support.

Last year, the city’s population increased for the first time since the late 1950s.

“They’re from Ohio, Kentucky (and) Tennessee. We have people coming from Baltimore, New York and Toronto. One person came from Brazil,” Johnnie Turnage says of the people who attended his Black Tech Saturdays events.

“We have a collaborator in Los Angeles who is considering moving here.”