Good news from Detroit

Dan Gilbert, a home grown Detroiter, created his own company, became a bazillionare, and is now helping to revive an American city that has fallen about as low as a city can fall.

   "Gilbert has a tendency to analogize, often plucking his comparisons from the worlds of gambling (he owns four casinos, including Detroit’s Greektown Casino-Hotel) or sports (he also owns the N.B.A.'s Cleveland Cavaliers). Detroit is his mission; he has gone all-in. He has brought 12,500 employees with him to downtown, and along with other private investors is funding the construction of a light-rail system that will connect the central business district with the neighboring Midtown district. Through his umbrella company, Rock Ventures, he formed a start-up incubator called Bizdom and a venture-capital firm, with some of the funded companies already expanding into other Gilbert-owned office space. He told me: “Here, man, oh, man, it’s a dream. Anything can be created in Detroit. Down here, like in basketball, you can create your own shot.” Investing in Detroit, he said, wasn’t like sitting at a roulette table and hoping it landed on 7. He was affecting the outcome — in a positive way, he hoped. He held to a maxim that you could “do well by doing good.” He could enrich a city and himself at the same time."

Dan Gilbert isn't the only one.  At a more granular level, others like him are throwing the dice, taking risks, and hoping to make good on those gambles.

     "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."

It should be noted that these are all private individuals who made it on their own, and who are attempting to see something in the ruins of socialist Detroit that no one else sees.  If the government could simply get out of the way, eliminate the public unions, remove the tax barriers and allow the genius and ambition of the normal American to rule, the problem of urban decay would be solved in ten or twenty years.  Such sudden success from the ruins would shock and surprise the progressive believers in big government, but not the believers in the American spirit.

More like this, and faster please.