Blight And Renewal: Quicken Loans Location

I've been meaning to write about the sorry state of my hometown for a while now. My recent trip out west, stopping through several other metropolitan areas has only reinforced the idea that Detroit is really in trouble. Downtown is just not as vibrant, as alive. People don't walk, storefronts don't line the street, and it's pretty dead at night. Compared with a place like Chicago, it's a ghosttown. You can walk a few blocks from the developed areas and stand in the middle of squalor and ruin, the worst excesses of the flight out of the urban core and towards the suburbs. Detroit is just about everything that's gone wrong with city planning and the post-industrial level, it's a mess.

On the other hand, one of my cousins just moved in downtown Detroit, to the area around Wayne State, and it's a great, lively place full of students and shops and restaurants, surrounded by theaters and museums and culture, the best of city life. And then there are articles like this which say that there's a lot to recommend in going downtown and the people who do are pretty happy they did.

There's a curious mix of crushing despair at the blight and the hopeful optimism that the city can be turned around and made into a great place again (Not that it was ever Chicago or New York, but if you go back to the 40s or 50s, the real heyday of the auto industry, then Detroit was a thriving city and one of the big, important urban centers in the country. Not #1, but definitely in the top 10. It's been sliding down ever since.). I really don't know what to make of it and I've been hoping to sit down and hash some of these thoughts out. I'm not exactly going to do that right now because I don't have any answers just yet to the central question of whether or not it's worth the effort. But the news that another company is planning on relocating to downtown Detroit is as good an entry point to the discussion as any other I've seen.

Basically, Quicken Loans is a mortgage company that operates out of Livonia, one of the many suburbs of Detroit. They don't seem to be having too much trouble with the whole housing bubble collapse and while they're not exactly the biggest game in the region where Ford and other multinationals are headquartered, they're a successful employer of thousands of people. And following the lead of CompuWare and the Lions football team, they're thinking about relocating from the suburbs, building a new headquarters somewhere in the downtown area. GM, too, although they just took over the RenCen. That's good news, of course, because it means more construction work and it also means more workers downtown who'll be buying lunch and stopping at stores while also being attracted to the casinos and theaters and sporting events and clubs and restaurants and everything else.

Downtown Detroit's seen a lot of development in recent years. There are places in downtown that are great, like the area my cousin's in – with Wayne State and the Center for Creative Studies and all the museums. Or the blossoming theater/stadium entertainment district – they're talking about putting the venerable Joe out to pasture and building a new hockey arena which would put the Lions, Tigers, and Wings all within a few blocks of each other surrounded by a ton of clubs and places like the Fox Theater, Second City, and Opera House. Campus Martinus Park, which is right nearby, has plenty of great restaurants and clubs. And the business district downtown with CompuWare and the RenCenter and the Guardian Building and more. And on the opposite side of the spectrum, my mother works at the DTE complex which is stranded out in the middle of nowhere along the Cass Corridor. They're next to the MGM Casino, though, so people can gamble for money to pay their heating bills, I guess (The casinos are another story and I think the biggest blunder as far as urban planning goes. They're spread out all over the place in separate little enclaves rather than bundled together in one area where people can walk from one to the other. Better for the casinos, I guess, but they could have made for another thriving district. Granted one filled with strip bars and seedy, smoke filled taverns but, hey, Detroit needs all the help it can get.). It's pretty barren but, like a lot of other places in Detroit, that just means there's a lot of opportunity to build up the area if there's ever a need.

But the question seems to be just where to locate the Quicken Loans headquarters to help keep that growth going. There are two options being discussed. One, Statler-Tuller seems to be the likely choice because it's farthest from the CompuWare headquarters and I think that Quicken doesn't want to be seen as being in their shadow. Plus, it's in an underused and underdeveloped area of the city and they can be seen as helping to spur developments in that area, just as CompuWare spurred things along – it's partly owned by the Illitch's, the family behind the Red Wings, Little Caesar's, and the Fox Theater, and I'm sured they'd throw their weight behind improving the area. So even though it's farther from other areas of town and going to require more work since it means messing about with the People Mover and a major street, I think it's the frontrunner.

My choice, though, would be the other site where the old Hudson's department building used to stand. It's been a hole in the middle of the city ever since Hudson's was torn down. Plus, it's within easy walking distance of Campus Martinus. So while it wouldn't spur development in a new area, I think it would reinforce, cement, the development that's already taken place. That's the choice here, really, between spreading the development out or concentrating it into one area. But, like the casinos, I think that creating a lot of little pockets all over the place isn't going to work as well as creating one big area of superdevelopment that will hopefully spill over into other areas. With a new office building along Woodward, you'd have the headquarters for Quicken and CompuWare within spitting distance of the city's new cultural hub and the newly beautified riverfront. A symbol of just how far the city's come. And, of course, just how far it has to go still. I hear rumblings there's another business planning on moving downtown, too, but I don't have any details just yet.