Delay, decay, repeat. How Develop Detroit's Hive project turned into a rat's nest

[Airforceguy]

The Hive sure looks good in artist's renderings, where a century-old industrial site known for street art and the former Busy Bee Hardware warehouse is transformed into an urban oasis full of color and life — a veritable beacon welcoming residents and shoppers to a triangular hunk of heaven across from Detroit's Eastern Market.

But real life in the Big City rarely lives up to the prospectus. It wasn't until bricks rained down from the top of a warehouse in Eastern Market last month that anyone other than Eric Grosinger and city inspectors had paid much attention to the decrepit buildings along nearby Gratiot Avenue. Now, Develop Detroit, a nonprofit with an otherwise admirable track record of building affordable housing, is the target of two lawsuits seeking to finish the work that time, nature and neglect started.


Grosinger's company, Kap's Wholesale Food Services, sued in July asserting that one of Develop Detroit's buildings was "structurally unsound, lacks a functional roof and harbors rodents and other likely vermin." Grosinger wants the buildings razed. The city sued a month later, branding the site a public nuisance and asking a judge to appoint a receiver to oversee the properties or hand them over to the city for cleanup or demolition. A city lawyer wrote that "not only have defendants failed to cure or remediate the blight at the subject properties, but defendants have taken the remarkable position that they will do nothing to remediate the blight or tear down the dangerous structures, but will merely pay the blight tickets as they accrue."

The city lawyer's use of bold, italic and underline in the lawsuit is one measure of the city's ire. Another may have been including Develop Detroit CEO Sonya Mays as a defendant in the lawsuit. If Mays' name sounds familiar, it could be because she has twice been elected to the Detroit Public Schools Community District school board.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/col...t/70991322007/

[Richard]

To prevent Detroit from becoming a city of 2 city’s.

Every city is a city of two cities,somebody has to pay the bills,and you cannot address blight without addressing blight.

This part

Develop Detroit started about eight years ago with the noble mission to create affordable housing and commercial developments to help stabilize neighborhoods and combat the racial and economic disparities in a city whose revival often seems reserved for people who can afford craft cocktails.


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Guess what,the reality is if you do not have those people that can afford craft cocktails,you do not have the money generated to build your projects as you are finding out.

It still costs money to be Nobel no matter how good the intentions are.

NYC is probably as progressive as Detroit is but the Bronx of the past is not the Bronx of today,it got to that point by displacement 90% of the projects in the city of Detroit recently have all addressed affordability issues.

The city got to where it is because the majority were broke,if you are broke you cannot pull off projects.