a little dated and maybe a bit rough around the edges. Up on the second floor, however, Bedrock has dramatically overhauled the space, opening up the once-cramped offices, creating a large open workspace, and bringing in new light from the street-facing windows. It’s an old office, to be sure, but the promise here is clear. Once complete, it will be every bit as nice as any modern office space and at least twice the size of Bizdom’s cramped quarters at the Madison.
“So all of this is brand new,” Randolph says, pointing around the room at all of the new installations, “and it just shows you what you can do with these spaces. We kept the ceilings the way they were, the walls the way they were, and we kept the columns here and just fixed them a little bit. But as far as power, networking, nothing was here.”
And that’s just one example. Two doors down, a three-story 1960s-era office building is getting a similar overhaul, with restaurant space slated for the ground level and a handful of smaller offices upstairs. Next door to that, Randolph points out a turn-of-the-century red stone structure on the corner that could easily have been a bank or private home back a century ago. It is now being restored to its former glory, with loftlike offices slated for construction above a large open retail space on the first floor. Similar projects are under way across the street and up the block, as Randolph points out building after building that Gilbert now owns.
But it’s still a work in progress. At the moment, there isn’t much street-level retail or a single restaurant to speak of within two blocks on this particular stretch of Woodward, though Randolph is optimistic that this area will be a Midwestern version of New York’s West Village in just a few years’ time. Part of the delay, he explains, has to do with a new light rail project that will eventually connect Downtown Detroit with some of the popular Midtown neighborhoods a few miles to the north. Once construction begins, Woodward Avenue will be torn up for a few months, which could make it difficult for retailers and restaurants in the area in the short term.
“The last thing we want to do is have these businesses move downtown, and then Woodward gets ripped up and they don’t do well,” Randolph says. The plan is for these businesses to move in after the light rail is complete.
We walk another block, past several buildings where the “Gilbert effect” has already taken hold. In one, we see a series of chain stores and some real signs of life. Across the street, there’s a rough-looking convenience store that clearly is not part of the master plan. On the corner, a shiny new Moosejaw Outfitters store anchors another Gilbert-owned building, with another Madisonlike collaborative space set to go in nearby. It will eventually rent out space to small startups that might need just a few workstations instead of a full office, Randolph explains.
“We want to get people out on the streets,” he says. “We want to make this a destination. So we’re working with some urban planners to make sure we plan this the right way and get the right people in the right spots. We only get one shot, you know.”
At the time of my visit, the real meat of the project was happening around Campus Martius Park, where the Quicken Loans offices are located in the modern Compuware building and where several of Gilbert’s larger corporate tenants are moving in. The twenty-five-story First National Building, for example, is anchored by Midwest law firm Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn LLP, complete with a snazzy New York–based coffee shop called Roasting Plant in the lobby. Across the street, at 611 Woodward, stands the Qube, a modernist structure where approximately 4,000 Quicken Loans employees are now located, as well as JPMorgan Chase Bank’s Detroit offices. Originally built in 1959, the building was overhauled by Gilbert and company in 2011.
Oddly enough, the Qube is also home to the Quicken Loans “command center,” which provides security services to the whole Campus Martius area. The company operates a series of more than fifty security cameras on all of its buildings, all capable of facial recognition, and it monitors them 24/7 from this glass-enclosed “eye in the sky.” This is in addition to the private Quicken security force that patrols Campus Martius on foot and provides shuttle service to employees.
“This area is the safest area in Detroit,” Randolph says. “People always say these negative things about Detroit but considering what goes on in New York, Chicago, Miami—all cities—the same things happen, but here it’s just further out. This is the safest part of the city, and we’re trying to make it even more secure.”
As part of this effort, Randolph explains, every time they buy a building they make a point to “light it up”—installing new lighting on the façade, the sidewalks, even the alleys. Everything. He says, “Before we came downtown, it was dark down here, and people were scared. Now people are coming back because they’re seeing that things are happening.”
It’s an impressive project, to be sure, and a valuable service to both Gilbert’s employees and the city in general given Detroit’s well-documented crime problem. But the very existence of such a high-tech security operation raises questions about the sustainability of the downtown core over the long term. Sure, Quicken Loans can afford this kind of system right now while business is good, but what about its neighbors? What about the startups? And how long will Quicken Loans really be interested in bankrolling the security of Downtown Detroit? What happens if they leave? If the city’s public services are so far gone as to require a private police force, which is what this Quicken Loans system really is, what chance do less well-funded companies have here? When we get to the point that private enterprise feels the need to subsidize its own police force to make its workers feel safe—well, clearly this is a dysfunctional city.
It’s all still a work in progress, though. At the time of my visit, Woodward Avenue was still essentially a ghost town of half-empty office towers, limited retail space, and minimal foot traffic. But a change is happening, if slowly. The chain stores are moving in, there is construction all around, and the sidewalks are legitimately more crowded than those in many other parts of the city. Boarded-up storefronts are noticeably less common.
And Randolph is excited to get the word out.
“One of our interns who was here this past summer went back to U of M [the University of Michigan] and brought 150 of her sorority sisters to Detroit for a visit,” he says. “We broke them up into groups of about twenty to twenty-five girls and, of the group that I had, only one was from Michigan. The rest were from Texas, New Jersey, New York. And they had never been downtown; they had only heard stories of Detroit.”
Needless to say, they were surprised by what they saw, he says. This past summer, Quicken Loans brought some 1,200 interns in to work at its downtown offices.
“The feedback we’ve gotten from the interns has been incredible,” says Randolph. “They love the city, and downtown is not what they expected. That’s what it’s all about.”
For their part, the entrepreneurs on the receiving end of all this development are upbeat when asked about Detroit’s long-term chances for success.
Michigan native Greg Schwartz returned to the city in 2012 to start his company, UpTo, a service that makes appointment calendars shareable on social networks, as part of the DVP portfolio. He and nine employees currently work out of the Madison building.
“For me, trying to do a startup in New York seems crazy,” Schwartz says. “From the office space, to the cost of doing business, and all the different distractions and people trying to do the same thing. Why do it there when I can come back to the Detroit area?”
The key selling point for him was hearing about everything that’s happening downtown and how many other startups are based in Detroit now. The ecosystem is starting to become self-supporting, he says.
“Here’s
