How Two Billionaires Are Remaking Detroit in Their Flawed Image

[Demeter]

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Jerome Robinson only got to live in the home of his dreams for five years before he was told to leave... when a Section 8-funded apartment in a Downtown building for the elderly opened up in 2007, he jumped at the opportunity.

“I thought, This is where I’m going to live until I die,” Robinson said. “I have bad eyes. I can’t drive. But I could go anywhere in the city I wanted from there. The bus was down the street, my bank was around the corner.”

Downtown Detroit is home to dozens of vacant buildings, but in 2013 developers set their eyes on 1214 Griswold, where Robinson and more than 100 other seniors lived. The developers, Broder & Sachse, wanted to convert the building into luxury condos. They told the residents they had to be out within the year.

As Detroit’s government has been hollowed out by forces beyond its control—emergency management, a fleeing tax base, cuts to federal funding—a small group of rich investors have descended on the city, filling in public sector gaps with personal funds, and remaking Detroit in their image. On top of this, local politicians—like Democratic Mayor Mike Duggan and Republican Governor Rick Snyder—as well as national media, have become enamored with these men, painting them as philanthropists on a mission to rescue Detroit.

Dan Gilbert, billionaire chairman of the mortgage company Quicken Loans, owns over 70 buildings Downtown and has been heralded as Detroit’s “new Superhero” and “missionary.” Mike Ilitch, the billionaire owner of Little Caesars Pizza, convinced the state to give him hundreds of millions for a new hockey arena because he has the “boldest” and “most innovative” plans for Detroit in decades (not because he’s grifting a poor state for personal profit).

If you read these stories, and only these stories, you’d be convinced that just months after emerging from a bankruptcy in which city workers had their pensions slashed and city department budgets were cut even further to the bone, Detroit is back. But beyond the new and restored gleaming skyscrapers of Downtown Detroit, and the puff pieces they inspire, is a grimmer reality. The rest of Detroit has become a wasteland. Areas like Jefferson Chalmers, Delray, and 8 Mile have been ravaged by foreclosures on houses with mortgages that banks should’ve never made; pockmarked by foreclosures on houses owned by people who owe just a few hundred dollars in taxes to the county, which is just now beginning to clamp down on past-due bills, threatening residents with evictions; and slowly left to rot by corporations who couldn’t figure out how to pay people a living wage and remain in business. As Downtown and Midtown gleam and bustle, residents of Detroit’s outer neighborhoods are fleeing. And instead of helping these people, the city seems to be courting those who need help the least—the Gilberts and the Ilitches, moneyed barons who can afford to buy up Detroit without regard for the people who made the Motor City what it is.

What Detroit is doing is not about indifference to the poor, but to the active support of projects that stand to benefit the rich the most. MORE

Peter Moskowitz is a writer based in New York. He’s writing a book about gentrification.