The Daring Vision to Renew Downtown Detroit

Here it is, 2025, and Dan Gilbert still feels a pinch of incredulity when he looks out his office window at the bustling streets of downtown Detroit. Less than 20 years ago, this part of the city was a ghost town. Now office workers fill the sidewalks during the day, and at night the walks are alive with people going to restaurants and bars, theaters and nightclubs, art galleries and sporting events. Many of these people not only work but also live downtown. That's all because Gilbert, founder and chairman of Quicken Loans and owner of several other businesses, teamed up with a few ambitious souls and decided to take a chance.

It was 2010. Gilbert, the son of a Detroit bar owner, had spent the previous 25 years building Quicken Loans into the nation's largest on-line mortgage lender. The company, based in the Detroit suburbs, had more than 4000 employees. Gilbert's decision to move his business to downtown Detroit bucked the historical trend of city-based firms relocating to suburban office parks.

Gilbert says he made the move not just out of altruism, but because it made business sense. "They were having a skyscraper sale in Detroit," he says. He snagged a bushel of buildings, some of them historic landmarks, at rock-bottom prices, plus a parking lot and four garages.

Soon Gilbert's office and retail space began filling up with a variety of businesses, notably tech startups, which were key to his strategy to turn Detroit into the Silicon Valley of the Midwest. "Wealth is created by brains today," he says. "It's not muscle anymore."

His strategy is so successful that downtown living spaces fill up, and people begin spilling into adjacent neighborhoods. "People are moving here because it's where the action is," Gilbert says. "The big sell is that they're making a change in this town."

Downtown Detroit's vitality was presaged by the construction of the Compuware Building in 2003. Peter Karmanos Jr., the co-founder of Compuware, promptly moved 4000 employees from the suburbs to the new 15-story tower. This influx of talent planted Detroit's flag as a future high-tech center.

Companies such as GalaxE.Solutions, a healthcare-industry software developer, joined the downtown Detroit club in 2011, when CEO Tim Bryan placed his 2000 employees in a building that had been acquired by Gilbert and his partners. Bryan tips his hat to the people and businesses who led the way. "Peter Karmanos, Mike Ilitch, Dan Gilbert, GM, the Fords?they're the reason I chose to locate here. They made the investment. I came here as an outsider because of those insiders."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/rebuilding-america/the-daring-vision-to-renew-downtown-detroit-13113551?src=rss

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