Cet article détaillé du New York Times décrit le travail colossal mené par
Dan Gilbert, homme d'affaires milliardaire et originaire de Detroit, pour
relancer l'activité économique de la ville et insuffler une dynamique. A travers cet homme c'est toute une ville qui veut voir renaître Detroit. La ville est le théâtre
d'initiatives quotidiennes menées par
des habitants dévoués et qui souhaitent améliorer leur environnement.
In downtown Detroit, at
the headquarters of the online-mortgage company Quicken Loans, there stands
another downtown Detroit in miniature. The diorama, made of laser-cut acrylic
and stretching out over 19 feet in length, is a riot of color and light: Every
structure belonging to Quicken’s billionaire owner, Dan Gilbert, is topped in
orange and illuminated from within, and Gilbert currently owns 60 of them, a
lordly nine million square feet of real estate in all.
(…)
The belief in Detroit’s imminent revival
has spread far beyond Dan Gilbert and the skyscrapers of downtown. Out in the
neighborhoods, there is a legion of mini-Gilberts, longtime Detroiters and
recent transplants alike, who have united around a conviction that the city has
fallen as far as it can go — that the time to buy in is at hand. Just a couple
of years after Detroit slid into what the national news media incessantly
called a “post-apocalyptic” collapse, the city now teems with a
post-post-apocalyptic optimism. When I visited this spring, Quicken Loans had a
new slogan emblazoning its downtown office towers and company shuttles, and
everyone I spoke with outside the city center seemed to be uttering it like a
mantra: OPPORTUNITY DETROIT.
Economists fret that Detroit, in the
absence of the manufacturing economy that built it, no longer has any reason to
be. And indeed, large chunks of the sprawling, 139-square-mile city have
literally vanished: Of Detroit’s 380,000 properties, some 114,000 have been
razed, with 80,000 more considered blighted and most likely in need of
demolition. But the new prospectors have an abiding faith that cities, like
markets, are necessarily cyclical, and that the cycle has finally come around.
It is the same ethos that turned other urban disasters into capitalist
boomtowns — New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or the cities of Western Europe
after World War II. If the scale of Detroit’s failure is unprecedented, then so
(the local reasoning goes) is the scale of its opportunity,
‘We want to have
an impact on the community, by putting money into it, repairing it, not
sticking on a Band-Aid.’
In the process, the Motor City has become
the testing ground for an updated American dream: privateers finding the raw
material for new enterprise in the wreckage of the Rust Belt. Whether or not
they’re expecting to profit, Gilbert and other capitalists — large and small —
are trying to rebuild the city, even stepping in and picking up some duties
that were once handled by the public sector. Shop owners around the city are
cleaning up the blighted storefronts and public spaces around them. Only 35,000
of Detroit’s 88,000 streetlights actually work, so some owners are buying and
installing their own. In Gilbert’s downtown, a Rock Ventures security force
patrols the city center 24 hours a day, monitoring 300 surveillance cameras
from a control center. Gilbert is proposing to pay $50 million for the land
beneath the county courthouse and a partly built jail near his center-city
casino, with the intention of moving the municipal buildings to a far-off
neighborhood; his goal is to clear the way for an entertainment district that
flows south, without interruption, from the sports arenas past his casino and
into downtown. Detroit’s new mayor, Mike Duggan, told me he had no problem with
the private sector doing so much to shape his city: Other metropolises had their
entrepreneurs and deep-pocketed magnates who built and bought and financed
things. With a state-appointed emergency manager overseeing various aspects of
Detroit’s operations, with many civic services inoperable for years and with a
dire need for investment, Duggan said he felt lucky that his town was getting
its turn.
There are no real assurances that gains
will be spread democratically across the city, or that city planning and public
resources will serve the needs of everyday Detroiters. But the hope is that
private individuals will keep the greater good in mind. Heaster Wheeler, the
assistant chief executive of Wayne County and former executive director of the
Detroit branch of the N.A.A.C.P., the nation’s largest chapter, sent me a list
of Detroit real estate investors who were committed to reviving the
neighborhoods through their work. “Black Dan Gilberts,” he called them. Since
2000, Wayne County has held one of the world’s largest real estate auctions,
offering about 20,000 properties a year that were acquired through foreclosure
— some 5 percent of Detroit’s housing stock. Last year, 2,300 bidders took
possession of 10,500 of these properties, with a dozen buyers each scooping up
more than 100 houses. Some speculators have sat on the inexpensive homes,
leaving them vacant as they await a recovery. Wheeler was talking about other
buyers who have repaired the houses and rented them out, creating an income
stream while adding a layer of stability to tottering sections of the city.
African-Americans make up 83 percent of Detroiters, but from 2000 to 2010 their
numbers fell by a quarter. “The city’s true heroes, its real saviors,” he told
me, “were the African-Americans who had a choice to leave Detroit, who had the
means, yet stayed. In spite of the public debacles, the racial insensitivities,
the public transportation that goes nowhere, the taxes up the wazoo, the unfair
auto-insurance costs, they still committed to making Detroit home.”
Early on a weekday morning, Gary Alexander
and Siegel Clore, a pair of investors from Wheeler’s list, drove me around the
blocks of northeast Detroit where they have accumulated scores of homes.
Alexander, 45, and Clore, 43, met in high school and still live in the houses
where they grew up. The Alexanders were the second black family on their block
in the Aviation Subdivision, near the city’s boundary with Dearborn. “Then one
day, I looked up, and every white person was gone,” Alexander said. Clore was
raised in Conant Gardens, one of the city’s first middle-class black neighborhoods,
where the blocks are now gaptoothed with abandoned property. The house next to
his, what he still thinks of as Mr. Edward’s house — named after a World War II
veteran who had lived there — he bought for $800 and uses as storage. A decade
ago, Alexander and Clore started buying real estate together, but that was
right before the housing bust. “We took some hard knocks,” said Clore, who is
tall and placid; Alexander is shorter, stockier and more excitable. In 2009,
after Clore was laid off by Merrill Lynch, they persuaded relatives and friends
to invest in their venture and began combing the thousands of properties in
that year’s county auction. They looked for bungalows in middling neighborhoods
near the border with the suburbs. They bought 15 houses at the auction for a
total of $60,000. Seven of them rented immediately. The next year, they
acquired 21 more, at an average of $3,000 apiece.
Clore and Alexander now own 70 houses, 50
of them leased and 20 undergoing renovations. Alexander wakes at 4:30 most
mornings, so he can spend an hour or so reading before the tumble of phone
calls begins: the hot water that is not hot, the contractor who needs supplies.
The men described the exhilaration of not only turning a profit but also owning
a part of Detroit, their city, and housing other Detroiters. They wanted me to
understand that the work they did was personal. Cruising around these blocks,
they felt a responsibility. “We want to have an impact on the community, by
putting money into it, repairing it, not sticking on a Band-Aid,” Clore said.
His father was an engineer who worked a lifetime in the boiler rooms of Detroit
public schools, but the women in his family were all educators. Clore started a
nonprofit organization in a local middle school, a program combining golf and
math that he hoped would spread. He and Alexander also want to start a business
incubator for African-American entrepreneurs, similar to what Dan Gilbert was
doing downtown. “A black Bizdom,” Alexander explained.
The two prefer buying houses that are
occupied, because scavengers often tear everything sellable out of the
unoccupied ones. When scouting, they ring doorbells and talk to tenants, many
of whom have been duped into paying rent to someone who doesn’t even own the
foreclosed property. Squatters sometimes curse them, and they see many signs in
windows and on doors that are meant to scare off investors: “House Full of
Bedbugs” or “If You Buy This House, I Will Burn It Down.” Because both men
worked as appraisers, they know how to estimate a house’s value and the cost of
repairs. They might get $750 a month in rent from a woman who worked in retail
or from someone paying with a federal Section 8 housing voucher; to make money
in this business, they calculated, they would have to buy and renovate each
property for a total of $15,000. They ask about leaks in the basement that
could suggest problems with the foundation. As they eyeball a roof for damage,
they ask if the furnace works or if it’s there at all.
The two of them took me inside a few
properties that were still being readied for tenants. They generally painted,
fixed broken windows, replaced the kitchen countertops and toilets, buffed the
wood floors and laid new carpet. The workers they hire are often as
transitional as the neighborhoods, so they let the men stay in the houses until
they’re rented. Clore and Alexander have become authorities on the vicissitudes
of blight, both in its broader boundaries and in the arbitrary shifts it can
take from block to block. They try to fix up the abandoned properties next to
their houses. They paint boarded-up windows white, mow lawns, pick up debris.
People sometimes call to ask if a rental property is in Detroit and hang up
when they hear the answer. But Alexander said many of their tenants were native
Detroiters moving back to the city now that rents were on the rise again in the
suburbs. They spoke with nervous excitement about plans to add to their
portfolio of homes and even to buy multifamily buildings. Clore plays golf
competitively, a 2 handicap, and on the links he sometimes networks with local
business types who say they want to invest in his growing business. He and
Alexander already manage an additional 50 rentals for out-of-state owners who
acquired the properties at auction. If credit eventually eases, they said, they
will begin selling off some of their holdings, turning a profit that way. The
Case-Shiller index puts home prices in Detroit up 15 percent from the same
point last year, although prices are still paltry compared with those of just
about every other city in the country. As we talked, Gary slowed to a crawl in
front of a home they bought in 2011. Both of its tenants worked, one at Quicken
Loans, in the Qube building. The modest two-flat sold in 2006 for $90,000, but
they would double their investment if they could get the renters to buy it for
just $30,000. “It’s funny,” Alexander said. “She works as a mortgage processor
at Quicken, and she can’t get a mortgage.”
Years of neglect have conditioned
Detroiters to head to the suburbs for almost all their shopping, spending a
total of $1.5 billion a year outside the city limits. For some of Detroit’s new
entrepreneurs, that represents a mint of lost retail to recoup. Detroit Future
City, a citywide master plan completed in 2012 after two years of meetings and
surveys, identified local retail as one cornerstone of a new urban economy, and
more than 50 nonprofit programs have been set up to foster small stores. In the
Jefferson East corridor, en route to the wealthy suburb of Grosse Pointe,
several of the nonprofits have helped a coffee shop and a furniture restorer
form the basis of a walkable retail strip, with the Detroit beer baron John W.
Stroh III paying for 3,500 hours of private security patrols of the area. In a collection
of five subdivisions called Grandmont-Rosedale in northwest Detroit, 12
residents are enrolled in a workshop through the nonprofit ProsperUs, learning
in the class I saw about securing credit and financing for their nascent
businesses.
Along a commercial stretch of Livernois
Avenue, which in better days earned the name Avenue of Fashion, the Detroit
Economic Growth Corporation enabled 10 entrepreneurs to start pop-up businesses
last September, matching each of them with artists who designed the temporary
spaces. The stores opened all at once, in an effort to create a retail
destination with spillover traffic. About 3,000 people attended the Livernois
opening festivities, in the rain. In a city with an outsize underdog pride,
residents seem desperate to participate in the rituals of revival. At 40, April
Anderson quit a human-services job to open a bakery called Good Cakes and Bakes
with her wife, using a $10,000 grant from a nonprofit organization called
Revolve Detroit. It, along with several other of the pop-ups, has since become
permanent. Another new store owner on the block, Chad Dickinson, moved here
from Nashville, where he built music studios, because he read that
20-somethings were among the fastest-growing groups in Detroit. He bought a historic
Tudor near Livernois for what seemed like a steal and started a furniture
business. Wearing a throwback Tigers cap over his long blond hair, he told me
that he purchased (“for dirt cheap”) and was rehabbing the shuttered Hunter’s
Supper Club, the center of the Avenue of Fashion in its heyday.
Rufus Bartell, who was sometimes called
the Avenue of Fashion’s mayor and even its Dan Gilbert, owns a corner clothing
store there. “Simply Casual is a lifestyle store catering to people who work
hard and play hard and making their transition between the two smooth,” he told
me. At 49, Bartell, wearing an ascot and sleek Puma sneakers, made it plain
that he was a man who wouldn’t be outworked or outplayed. Like just about
everything in Detroit, his store is a former something — Grinnell Brothers
pianos, back when the wives of auto executives strolled the avenue’s high-end
shops, and later a cleaners. He believed that the once-thrumming Motor City was
more a land of opportunity today than it was at any moment in his lifetime. For
the first time in eight years, sales at his store were picking up. With his
nephew, a recently retired N.F.L. cornerback, Bartell is also opening a
chicken-and-waffle restaurant on the Avenue of Fashion. And alone or with other
partners, he has bought five vacant storefronts there, some 40,000 square feet.
He is confident that he can fill it all with retail.
Bartell always juggles a number of
enterprises, he told me, purposefully keeping his portfolio diverse. He has
also involved himself in the larger enterprise of civic development. “That’s
how you graduate from being a business owner to a business leader, and it’s why
I admire Dan Gilbert,” he said. Bartell serves on the advisory boards of
Detroit Future City, the Michigan Garment Council and a nonprofit organization
that funds Detroiters who plan to open unique shops in their communities. On
Livernois, he said, four new restaurants and six more stores are preparing to
open in the next year or so, and the entire strip has the support of the
nonprofit groups and their grant money. Just last month, after six years of
considering it, he and a handful of other business owners paid for a billboard
on the northern end of the corridor, advertising the revived Avenue of Fashion
as a place to “Shop. Dine. Explore.” Most of all, Bartell feels confident that
the pendulum has already begun to swing in Detroit’s favor. Along his half-mile
of Livernois, there are 51 retailers doing $47.6 million in annual sales. The
median household income in the surrounding residential blocks is $56,000, among
the highest in the city. Although most of sparsely populated Detroit is seeing
very little economic activity or likelihood of any to come, there are a
half-dozen retail corridors like the Avenue of Fashion in the city. The
business resource center D-Hive has graduated 350 Detroiters from its
small-business classes in the last two years and has 100 people on its waiting
list for coming sessions. According to the National League of Cities, Detroit
was the fifth-ranked city in the U.S. in 2012 in terms of jobs per capita from
start-ups, beating out San Jose, Calif. “Detroit is getting ready to hit
momentum,” Bartell told me. “When you hit momentum, companies go from small to
big.”
Extrait
de l’article publié dans la version électronique du New-York Times le
11.07.2014
Journaliste : Ben Austen
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