Dan Gilbert’s Quest to Remake Downtown Detroit (original) (raw)

Business|A Missionary’s Quest to Remake Motor City

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/business/dan-gilberts-quest-to-remake-downtown-detroit.html

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A Missionary’s Quest to Remake Motor City

April 13, 2013

THE best way to experience all that is strange and a little otherworldly about downtown Detroit is to walk the streets around 5 p.m. on a weekday. At that hour, you’ll notice not just the peculiarity of what is around you — notably, the gorgeous, Art Deco skyscrapers alongside empty, decrepit buildings — but also what is missing. There is no traffic here. As the workday ends, cars trickle out of underground parking lots and speed off to nearby highways, but in a volume that doesn’t cause delays.

It is just one small sign of how far Detroit’s fortunes have fallen: the birthplace of the mass-produced automobile, the city that gave us the infuriating, bumper-to-bumper commute, is now so sparsely populated that it doesn’t have a rush hour.

Dan Gilbert would like to change that. No, he’s not interested in a honking pileup of S.U.V.’s. Mr. Gilbert, 51, a Detroit native and the fantastically wealthy founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, wants to revive two square miles that were once the thrumming heart of this city. To do so, he has already spent roughly $1 billion acquiring nearly three million square feet of real estate, and is ready to close another deal, for the Greektown Casino-Hotel and nearby parking lots, that will add one million more square feet to his holdings.

His real estate company, Bedrock Real Estate Services, is renovating properties, building apartments and wooing corporate tenants. A seven-mile light rail system is in the planning stages, underwritten by a number of businesses and business leaders, including Mr. Gilbert, as well as foundations and a federal grant.

Along with his employees, civic groups and public-spaces gurus, he is devising strategies to “activate” streets with outdoor seating and ground-level retail stores. Taxpayers will kick in a yet-to-be-determined sum for parts of this rehabilitation program, but it will be a fraction of what Mr. Gilbert contributes.

His plans, according to academics like Brent D. Ryan, author of “Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities,” amount to one of the most ambitious privately financed urban reclamation projects in American history.

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