when he Book a hotel in Cadillac Opened in Detroit a century ago this month, it crowned the Motor City as one of the most dominant metropolitan powers on the planet.
The tallest hotel in the world at that time, it had more than 1,100 rooms spread over 31 floors. Back then, Detroit was a place where everyone wanted to see or be seen as the city’s dominant industry – automobiles – fueled the dawn of mass mobility for the rest of the world.
While the decades since have been less kind, today Detroit is in the midst of a resurgence.
In the recently inaugurated New laboratory At the tech center, once an abandoned book warehouse for the city’s school system, robots move across bare concrete floors. Outside, the whirlwind of an electric all-terrain vehicle fills the streets. Inside the building, more than 100 startups are working to discover the future of mobility.
While a century ago immigrants from Syria, Poland and Ireland landed at the nearby Michigan Central train station, today entrepreneurs and engineers from Mexico, Norway and beyond they are descending upon the city.
Many have chosen to come to Detroit instead of Boston, Silicon Valley or Austin because a new wave of innovation (and a $700 million investment by Ford Motor Company, city tax breaks and money from other investors) is helping to revive a place that for a long time served as a model for the death of the American city.
LivaqA startup founded by David Medina, a 26-year-old Mexican entrepreneur, is developing electric all-terrain vehicles that will reduce air and noise pollution in urban environments. The Norwegian firm wheel.me promises to turn any object into a robot capable of autonomously moving huge objects and is working with some of Detroit’s top automakers.
“When we wanted to expand into the U.S. market, Siemens, one of our biggest customers, has a huge base in Atlanta, so we were attracted to moving there,” says Robert Skinner, a Detroit native and CEO of EcoG in the United States. , a Munich-based electric vehicle charging technology company.
“But when the team came to the Detroit auto show, they saw the recovery, everything that’s happening — there’s a big buzz here. We had a one-on-one meeting with the governor… All of that helped make the decision to settle here.”
Just a decade ago, General Motors was bankrupt and with $18 billion in debt the city ran out of cash, becoming the largest city in the United States to go bankrupt. Its emergency services were closed as, over decades, around 700,000 residents abandoned the city and its growing list of problems.
All the while, the massive Michigan Central building and the old book depository next door served as a reminder of both Detroit’s grand, distant past and more recent decline.
In 2018, Ford Motor Company purchased the 90-acre site for $90 million and has since dedicated 1.7 million hours of work involving thousands of tradespeople to return the stunning classic fine arts building to its former glory.
“At its peak (in the 1940s), 4,000 people walked through Michigan Central every day (taking trains to and from Detroit),” says Josh Sirefman, executive director of Michigan Central.
“Recently, 4,000 people have returned to using the building. There is a kind of poetry in that. “It’s an important 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 like Detroit natives Diana Ross and Eminem sold out in a matter of hours.
As the largest black-majority city in the country, efforts to foster minority-led innovation have been part of the story of the resurgence.
In spring 2023, Alexa Turnage and her husband, Johnnie, founded Black Tech Saturdays after being told that black tech founders and entrepreneurs “don’t exist.”
“We’d start here at 10am on Saturdays, and at 5pm people would still turn up looking to get involved,” says Johnnie.
Since then, the organization has held dozens of workshops and networking events in support of local and national Black tech communities from its base in Central Michigan.
“Our most important event was when we had a acquisition of female founders last March. About 1,200 people entered. “We took over the three floors of this building.”
Hundreds of high school students have also gone through Google’s Code Next program, an effort also found in Central Michigan.
It’s not just Central Michigan that’s experiencing a resurgence.
A decade ago, most of downtown Detroit’s skyscrapers were abandoned or abandoned. Today, each has been renovated in different states and all are occupied once again.
The recovery of the Book Tower, a 38-story Renaissance-style building, is especially satisfactory for many.
“It is difficult to overstate how much damage had been done to the building. It was a combination of deterioration (stone panels coming off the walls, painted glass ceilings falling down) and damage,” says Jamie Witherspoon of Bedrock, a real estate company owned by Dan Gilbert, the Detroit billionaire who owns Rocket Mortgage and Cleveland of the NBA. Gentlemen.
Bedrock’s central project for the last decade has been to bring the Book Tower back to life.
The building had been vacant for six years before Gilbert and his team came in with deep pockets to repurpose the former office tower for 21st-century palates.
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 contemplating life in a resurgent urban center. Architectural Digest Magazine has named it One of the most beautiful reused buildings in the world.
“We saw this as an opportunity, on some level, to take what had been a poster child for urban decay and turn it into a place for lots of different people to come and experience it,” Witherspoon says.
Still, the city faces big challenges.
Poverty in Detroit is almost three times the national average, while housing costs have skyrocketed in gentrifying neighborhoods. seen some residents‘lives disrupted.
When General Motors recently asked the city of Detroit to come up with $250 million to help renovate its iconic RenCen skyscrapers, some resident groups balked.
But the city’s upward trajectory is undeniable.
On a field next to Central Michigan, Detroit City FC awaits build a new stadium very close to the Mexicantown neighborhood, a community from which the soccer team draws much of its support.
Last year, the the city’s population grew for the first time since the late 1950s.
“They drive from Ohio, Kentucky (and) Tennessee. We have people coming from Baltimore, New York and Toronto. One person came from Brazil,” says Johnnie Turnage of the people who attended his Black Tech Saturdays events.
“We have a collaborator in Los Angeles who is thinking about moving here.”