Are you talking about buildings on Woodward or Palmer?
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Yeah, the "exclusive" Loft thing has not always worked. In the interest of screening tenants but having sky - high rents these places end up being to expensive even for the dinks [[double income no kids) types. Plus if the surrounding environment is too bad no one is going to pay big money to live in a "walled off" situation. Community make a difference!
On Woodward just north of Palmer south of 94. I don't remember the name of the developer, it had[[ has) a female name and had re done some older historic homes on Cass so I had hope back then as they were "in filling" the whole John R., East Palmer, Ferry Ave. areas but it was too little too late.
Detroit has such potential to be the next new city with all of it's existing infrastructure and still a nice CBD and Midtown just gotta work on those last 5 miles up Woodward :D :rolleyes:
I didn't get it when I lived there and after living in NYC, Columbus and now Chicago I've always lived in "affordable" places and we have quite a few empty store fronts, upper stories of low rise apts., but they just sit with dirty windows very few are boarded up and certainly not burned repeatedly.
The problem is that huge buildings like these are white elephants, built at a time when young single people were flocking to the city, and when the fossil fuels used to fire their boilers were artificially cheap. Add to the equation years of deferred maintenance, high vacancy, and the nearly complete abandonment of HP by the middle class and you've got a lose/lose situation.
Every time that the economy has taken a nose dive, there have been waves of abandonment of large buildings like this one. Obviously, we are seeing another such wave. Perhaps the cities of Detroit and HP could apply for some federal assistance in demoing many of these structures..but please, not this one.
If there were just three large buildings in HP that could be saved, my picks would be this one, the McGregor Library and the Model T plant.
For sure this is a bad wave and the departure and erosion of so much of the middle-class bill and tax paying citizens of Highland Park has certainly made a difference there as it has in Detroit in general, but the blight in more concentrated in Highland Park. Like the down fall of so many of it's buildings like the two on Woodward.
I am sure that I will get grief for saying this, but why doesn't the state offer free rent in these places to people who will move there businesses to Detroit? Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Could work, in the less crime infiltrated buildings with a semblance of a interested community not fully crime entrenched.
Otherwise you'd have an island "barricaded" business with no one coming to purchase services from you for fear of crime on their person [[like getting out of their car)... And it ain't a great day "working" for said business knowing it's hard to get out for lunch/ having to be walked/ watched to your car.
I work in a situation "somewhat" like this on the east side so I know of what I speak and I was born, reared and educated and live in Detroit, so I'm not being providential, "prissy" or paranoid.
However, I think the buildings closer to WSU, Midtown etc. could be very successful with good planning for specific businesses.
The buildings in Highland Park. Sadly no. Crime is still too high.