Glimmers of hope in Detroit

Last year Dan Gilbert moved Quicken Loans, the largest internet mortgage company in the US, from Detroit's suburbs to the heart of downtown. This month, the 1,700 Quicken employees were joined by another 2,000 workers that Gilbert moved into a second building close by.

"Gilbert is buying other buildings for internet start-ups, and is planning a big new residential development and lots of retail space in the area as well," The Economist reports. “The intellectual energy of a city depends on livability,” he told the magazine. “We have to create a hot urban core, and it is going to happen.”

Another bright sign noted by The Economist is this:

David Egner, who runs Detroit’s New Economy Initiative (founded three years ago with a $100m budget by a group of ten non-profit organisations) has high hopes for TechTown, a business accelerator his organisation helped set up on the corridor to take advantage of Wayne State University, the Detroit Medical Centre and the Henry Ford Hospital.

Though some of TechTown's businesses are in not very high-tech fields such as dry cleaning and art restoration, the complex "has 250 businesses on its books, and a waiting list of 40 would-be start-ups; it is considering a number of additional buildings for expansion," the magazine says.

The M1 light-rail line is planned for the Woodward Avenue corridor, from the Detroit River and downtown to the city's northern boundary at 8 Mile Road. The article candidly surveys some of Detroit's major problems, including population loss, housing abandonment, and a low number of residents with college degrees, but weighs those factors against a variety of encouraging initiatives, some of them backed by philanthropic organizations such as the Kresge Foundation. The low price of real estate in the city is seen as a potential lure for businessses and homebuyers.