Dan Gilbert - First Recipient of Crain’s Newsmakers Hall of Fame

**Lowell** · January-06-20, 08:32 AM

In making Dan Gilbert a not-surprising recipient of this kudo Crain’s cites an impressive list of achievements in what they dub “The Decade of Dan”. This article highlights the decade. Some worthy snippets are:

Matt Cullen, Gilbert’s right hand man, describes how it began in 2009.

“Gilbert was fuming about Wayne County's plans to build a new 2,000-bed jail on Gratiot Avenue alongside I-375.

"This doesn't make any sense," Gilbert told Cullen. "You have to get into it and try and change the trajectory of this thing."

"Well, there's a couple of problems with that — we're not even in Detroit," he told Gilbert. "And this thing is already cooked.

So he move Quicken HQ to the Compuware building the next year and “the rest is history”.

“But instead of becoming yet another speculator who sits on empty, rotting properties — or razing buildings for more surface parking — Gilbert deployed capital throughout the central business district, turning around one distressed property after another.”

“Quicken Loans and the family of companies [[there are literally dozens of them) swelled to a Detroit workforce of 17,000 — more employees downtown than GM, Blue Cross Blue Shield and the Detroit Medical Center combined.”

His energy and example inspired others, most famously:

Ford Motor Co. bought the decrepit Michigan Central Station train depot — an unimaginable redevelopment project prior to Gilbert's downtown crusade — as Henry Ford's great-grandson, Bill Ford Jr., follows Gilbert's fundamental belief that innovation will be borne from cities, not sterile suburban office parks."

Then he built:

“After largely filling up his main downtown buildings with employees and tenants, Gilbert vowed to go to vertical in a city where a skyscraper hasn't been built since the 1970s construction of the Renaissance Center.”

“As Gilbert made real estate moves and Quicken Loans scrapped and clawed to be No. 1 in the residential mortgage origination business, the billionaire businessman started moving into other areas of Detroit life."

Then his concerns broadened:

“After Gilbert co-chaired a 2013 task force on blight and testified in federal court about it in Detroit's bankruptcy case, his company's philanthropic arm went looking for solutions to preventing neighborhood blight and destabilization.”

“Gilbert also stewed in recent years about the high price of auto insurance…. Gilbert dispatched a team of lobbyists and consultants to the Capitol to engage in a campaign to get the Legislature to eliminate mandatory medical coverage for auto insurance. He threatened a 2020 ballot campaign.”

Congrats and well-deserved Dan. Please get fully recovered soon!