PHOTO: Home-buying entrepreneurs Gary Alexander, left, and Siegel Clore in northeast Detroit. By Andrew Moore for The New York Times
A long article about Detroit in the New York Times Sunday magazine starts with Dan Gilbert and has a chunk of reporting about Slow's barbeque founder Phil Cooley.
But it also tours the fringes of the city and visits such entrepreneurs as Gary Alexander and Siegel Clore, two young African Americans who grew up in Detroit and are buying and rehabbing single-family homes.
The article, by Ben Austen, is a comprehensive look at the various efforts and theories underway to revitalize Detroit. Much of its content will be familiar to people who closely follow city news, but readers outside southeast Michigan will learn a lot about what's happening behind the headlines concerning Detroit's bankruptcy.
Austen concludes by visiting the Urban Bean Company, the coffee shop with the orange facade on the northwestern edge of Capitol Park.
It is in a narrow wedge of a building opposite Capitol Park. It sells locally sourced coffee and food; upstairs, amid a sliver of seats, patrons can spin electronic-music records on a turntable. Save for the two owners, though, the place was empty. Ed Siegel sat with his elbows on the counter. He told me he had worked at a New York office of Moody’s, in commercial mortgage-backed securities. Two years ago, he visited Detroit and drove the length of Woodward Avenue, from downtown to 8 Mile Road. He was so sure he was seeing a city poised for rebound that he moved permanently. His partner in the venture, Josh Greenwood, who left a Chrysler truck-assembly plant after a decade on the line, leaned against a wall with his eyes closed, nursing a sore back. He opened the coffee shop initially in 2000, thinking the area was already on the mend, but he had to shut it down during the mortgage-foreclosure mess. Last year, with all Gilbert was planning for Capitol Park — “downtown’s hidden jewel,” Rock Ventures branded it — he figured it was time to start again.
But even there, just two blocks from Gilbert’s Qube, the revival has yet to arrive. The park’s small triangle of grass is still cramped with homeless people and surrounded by walls covered in graffiti. Empty buildings are everywhere. Across the street from Urban Bean, a fire had recently transformed a strip club called the Grind into a blackened husk. The countless small businesses, the swarm of nonprofit groups and pop-up retail, the transplanted young techies and artists, the widespread investment in real estate snatched up at thrift-store prices — for all of that, the new Detroit remains more an idea on paper than a coalescing future. Dan Gilbert has faith: This spring, he bought eight more properties. But he has plenty of money to lose on his conviction, whereas Greenwood and Siegel do not. They got in on what looked like the ground floor, and now they are praying that it truly was the bottom.
“Sitting here, waiting, it’s the hardest part,” Siegel said, twitching with nervous laughter.
