challenge with Detroit is that there are so many pockets of despair,” she says. “We have the riverfront, downtown, mid-town, here at TechTown, and the north end. Really, the entire downtown area runs from the river to Grand Boulevard and even just getting connectivity between those districts has been a thirty-year challenge. And they’re still not really connected.”
One of the mysteries of Detroit is what happened with the city’s freeways, she says, which cut through the heart of downtown and take away many of the walkable areas.
“We broke up all of our neighborhoods, broke people apart, and created all of this segregation and the racial challenges that go along with that. That still faces us today. What started as a central business district approach has broken up into all of these different neighborhoods, so we still have some infrastructure and walkability challenges.”
As a result, her work at TechTown, which was originally designed and funded as a fairly straightforward technology accelerator program, has taken on more and more traditional economic development projects (though the tech incubator still exists and works with a limited number of companies each year). Right now, Smith says, the organization has become the “last stop before dying” for all sorts of people who really have no business calling themselves “entrepreneurs,” let alone tech entrepreneurs.
The problems began when “entrepreneurship” became the answer for anyone who had anything to do with the dying automotive industry, she says. You spent twenty-five years fitting frame rivets? Start a company. Your career was in design and fabrication? Start a company. You shipped tires for a decade? Start a company.
“For some people it was, ‘I finally get to do this thing that I’ve always wanted to do,’ and that was great,” Smith says. “But for many people, we took them on this really weird path to creating a company when all they really wanted was a job, and we weren’t helping them find jobs.”
So TechTown has begun to go into neighborhoods, doing work that is well outside its technology portfolio, if for no other reason than the fact that there is really no one else willing to do it. It offers retail boot camp programs to help storefront shop owners launch and maintain their businesses. It works with small-time service providers to make sure they have the resources they need to succeed. It goes in, solves problems as needed, and then leaves.
“It’s been really humbling work,” Smith says. “We just go in and ask them what they need. We have some team members who are really passionate about this mission, so they’re embedded in the neighborhoods, have offices there, but most of this is basic stuff. Getting them QuickBooks. Getting them access to suppliers or other resources that they need.”
And it’s surprisingly capital efficient, especially for an accelerator that usually works with tech companies. In the four months that TechTown spent working in the Brightmoor neighborhood—“which has abject poverty, and disinvestment, and population shrinkage, and crime, and I think is just a really horrifying place,” Smith says—it added four new jobs, stabilized fifteen local businesses, and added two new businesses to the economy.
“We’ve kind of become integrated in a neighborhood that kind of felt forgotten and now doesn’t anymore,” she says.
Inspiring stuff, for sure, but what does any of this work have to do with technology? Very little, admittedly, but the real key here, according to Smith, is shoring up the Detroit economy from the ground up and laying the foundation for future growth. Without those stable local neighborhoods, without a city that really wants to improve, it will be all but impossible to ever get the tech ecosystem in Detroit off the ground.
“The challenge of the Detroit experience is that it’s pretty wonderful,” she says. “It’s very satisfying at the end of every day to say, ‘OK, I made a difference.’ But there are elements of this work that are simply exhausting. And if we can’t figure out stickiness, I think what we’ll do is we will attract them, and we will get a lot out of them, but we won’t be able to keep them. Technology companies, specifically, still don’t have in the state of Michigan a real venture capital industry. We have a lot of state support for startups, but we only have a small group of investors. So you almost ultimately have to leave if you grow a significant business here, because the answers are not here. We’re going to grow these fantastic companies, and we’re going to lose them.”
Part of the problem isn’t even unique to Detroit; it’s common across the Midwest: You don’t move to the area unless you have a good reason to be there. Of the two dozen people I talked to in the area, all but one of them either grew up in the region originally or had married into a Michigan family. Transplants just don’t stay here. They rarely come here in the first place. Sure, many transplants have been moving in to be a part of “the great Detroit comeback,” but the reality is they generally don’t stay for long. It’s just too big. Too overwhelming. The problems are too numerous. And if you don’t have a built-in reason to stay, it just makes too much sense to hightail it back to wherever you came from and start over there.
At least you tried, right?
Amid all this doom and gloom, does tech in Detroit really stand a chance? It’s complicated.
During my visit, I kept a list of “things I’d never seen in the US before,” and it ended up running to more than a half dozen legal-sized pages.
Marked city streets that peter out into nothing or turn into dirt? Detroit has those, and they’re surprisingly close to downtown.
Blocks worth of broken streetlights? Tired, old police cars with mismatched, mid-nineties graphics? Yep.
Abandoned libraries and torched elementary schools? Saw several of those, too.
Graffiti on occupied homes? Lines on the road that don’t match up after intersections? Collapsed buildings immediately adjacent to open businesses? Yes, yes, and yes.
And that was all before the city was forced to declare bankruptcy in July 2013, kicking off the largest metropolitan rescue effort in US history. That’s still a work in progress.
Despite the problems, there is a lot of optimism in and around Detroit these days. The city has struggled for more than a decade, but many in the area now see technology as a way to bring at least some of Detroit’s lost glory back. No, it likely won’t erase the images of the abandoned and crumbling old train station in Corktown anytime soon, and the wasteland between downtown and midtown will probably linger for a while, but at least now the city has a plan. It has hope. It finally has some economic growth on the horizon.
“When you think about other places and what they’re going to be like five years from now, it’s hard to think about anything that’s going to be [more] different than Detroit,” says DVP’s Stasik. “San Francisco is going to be San Francisco, except they’ll probably put lights on the Bay Bridge. New York is going to be amazing for all the reasons that it is, but it will still be New York. Chicago is going to be Chicago. But I think Detroit is one of the cities where I think the next five years are going to be transformational.”
And, at the end of the day, that’s the big selling point for entrepreneurs in this town. Sure, you can come to the city, find some funding, and get your own personal dreams and aspirations off the ground. There is a community and a support network in place to make that happen now. But startup life in and around Detroit is about more than just individual goals and individual aspirations. It’s about the fortunes of the city and the region, it’s about contributing to something bigger than yourself, and it’s about getting in on the ground floor of what, many hope, could be one of the largest civic recovery projects in US history.
For entrepreneurs,
