Daily Detroit

The Motor City is synonymous with the car. It's called, after all, the Motor City. But will the next chapter of Detroit be so car-focused? And how will those changes happen? Today's episode of Daily Detroit is a conversation with Kevin Bopp, the Vice President of Parking and Mobility for Bedrock. That's the real estate arm of Dan Gilbert's family of companies. Each day, they need to get many thous...

Over on Belle Isle today, boosters broke ground on the Piet Oudolf garden, the unofficial name for the landscape installation planned for 2.5 acres at the Nancy Brown Peace Carillon. Oudolf is a legendary Dutch garden designer and author who's perhaps best known for his work on New York City's  High Line , a linear park on a former elevated rail track, and the  Lurie Garden  in Chicago's Millenniu...

Midtown Detroit, Inc. and the Detroit Institute of Arts have announced the winner of its DIA Plaza | Midtown Cultural Connections international design competition, first launched in 2017.  Detroit Square  is a proposal from an international consortium led by Paris-based Agence Ter and including Detroit-based Akoaki, rootoftwo, and Harley Etienne. The proposal reimagines the 83-acre Cultural Center...

Oak Park is a diverse inner-ring suburb of more than 29,000 people nestled between Ferndale, Detroit, Berkley and Southfield. It's in a great location, minutes from a variety of job centers. It's seeing a lot more action as nearby cities like Ferndale grow (yes, there are lofts going for $5,000 a month in downtown Ferndale now and housing prices are racing up). And the added cost of living in near...

Welcome to a bonus Friday edition of your Daily Detroit. Today, we discuss the sad news that Axle Brewing will shutter its Livernois Taproom June 30th, barely two years after it first opened. Dave Phillips, one-half of  Podcast Detroit  and the  IT in the D  podcast, and himself a former partner in a failed craft brewery, joins us to discuss how difficult it is to succeed in an uber-competitive se...

Welcome to a very Motor City-centric edition of your Daily Detroit. Today, we're running down a pair of big stories from the auto industry, speaking with  Kristin Dziczek , vice president of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor. First up: Fiat Chrysler has withdrawn its $35 billion proposal to merge with French automaker Renault just 10 days after FCA first announced the proposal. It co...

Are tax incentives as a tool to lure large-scale corporate investment and jobs here to stay? That's the question at the heart of this interview today with Kevin Johnson, the president and CEO of the Detroit Economic Development Corp. It's particularly timely in the midst of Chrysler's planned $2.5 billion investment to create nearly 5,000 new jobs on Detroit's east side, where workers will build t...

Welcome to an al fresco edition of your Daily Detroit, recorded au natural in a park near downtown Royal Oak. We were there to cover a press event to discuss some of the things in store for  Arts, Beats & Eats , which returns for its 22nd edition with a new sponsor Aug. 30-Sept. 2. We also cover the details of the newest historic building rehab in Detroit. It's called the Assembly, a mixed-use off...

Happy Monday, and welcome to a new week of your Daily Detroit. Today, Jer talks about an eventful past week spent at the Mackinac Policy Conference on Mackinac Island, filling us in on some of the things he came away with beyond just the headlines about no-fault auto insurance reform. Specifically, it's becoming clear that Detroit's comeback needs a lot more juice (read: money — and residents) jus...

Eastern Market is going through a lot of change. Shops are closing or moving. New land owners are moving in. Companies who have been in the market a long time need to expand. And at the center of it all is the Eastern Market Corporation (now the Eastern Market Partnership. Their CEO, Dan Carmody, saw these changes coming and has a plan. We talk about the changing neighborhood, the future vision, a...

Just in time for the Mackinac Policy Conference, the Center for Michigan and its Bridge Magazine have a new report out all about Michigan's abysmal roads. It's titled  Fixing Michigan's Road Mess: The Unclear Path Ahead . The report is the result of convening more than 3,200 residents across the state to talk about the state of our roads. It found broad agreement, unsurprisingly, that our roads ar...

Spring is here! It's the time of year where more people start to get out and about. Because of that, bar and restaurant concepts are starting to get into swing and get some attention. For today's episode, our man about town Devon O'Reilly stops by the studio to talk about what's hot around Detroit. Whether it's a new bar on Bagley, a Mexican place named Peso, or winery that uses Detroit-grown grap...

The Detroit Grand Prix is an annual event that brings nearly a hundred thousand people to the island, national television coverage and some charity dollars through their Grand Prixmere fundraiser. But there's a group of concerned citizens and park goers who say that the price paid in damage to the park and restricted access is too high. Today on the show, we talk about this with three members of B...

Welcome to the Hump Day edition of your Daily Detroit, in which we run down the news that businessman Roger Penske is pouring $5 million into the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood on Detroit's east side. It's part of the city's Strategic Neighborhood Fund. Jer also has a conversation today with Rob Sadow, the co-founder and head of Scoop Technologies. It's a carpooling app that connects drivers, rid...

Baker's Keyboard Lounge and, more recently, the Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe in Grosse Pointe Farms are famed venues for jazz in Detroit. But another venue played a huge role in that scene for decades: the Blue Bird Inn. Located at 5021 Tireman on the city's west side, the Blue Bird Inn was a major nexus of Detroit's swinging post-war, pre-Motown jazz scene, a black-owned business that hosted the likes of...

Welcome to a Car-a-Palooza edition of your Daily Detroit. Today, we dive into the news that Dan "Dantroit" Gilbert is  lining up a petition drive effort  to force the issue of reforming Michigan's no-fault auto insurance system. If successful, it could allow Republican lawmakers, who already have passed essentially the same proposal, to approve it with simple majority votes. Will this ratchet up p...

Detroit's had a long journey since it was founded as a frontier outpost by the French. There's been a lot of books about more recent Detroit history. Think 1900 forward. But not so many that look at the first years of Detroit, ones that were formative to the city we know today. R.J. King — an award-winning journalist, author and editor of dBusiness — joined me in the studio today to talk about his...

On today's episode, we speak with Casper van Alfen and Joanna van der Leun of  the Motown Movement . That's the organization founded by architecture students from the Netherlands that bought an abandoned home in Detroit for $1,000 and have been fixing it up with the help of local nonprofits and with the goal of making it into a model of accessible and affordable environmental sustainability. Van A...

Gerrymandering — the practice of drawing state legislative and congressional districts to favor one political party over another — is back in the news. Republican state lawmakers are proposing measures to weaken efforts to overhaul the process by which these maps are drawn. That's despite a recent judicial order to design new district maps for 2020 and voters' approval last fall of Proposal 2, whi...

Welcome back to the week! There's a lot in our latest episode. Let's dive in. - The Ilitch organization will receive another $74 million dollars in taxpayer subsidies for the District Detroit.  - John Beilein is leaving his job as coach of the University of Michigan Men's basketball team to take over as head coach of the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers. - Hazel Park is set to get a new mixed-use mid-ris...

Today we're taking a look at a company that's making high-end leather goods right here in the city of Detroit, putting Detroiters and veterans to work. We're talking about Pingree Detroit, based just about a block away from the well-known Shinola. Pingree is a worker-owned company formed as an L3C — a special type of company that puts both the bottom line and the social mission of the company firs...

Como's, a longtime mainstay of downtown Ferndale, has been reimagined by Chef Zack Sklar. The chef is doing something really cool in elevating pizza and having some creative takes on some old favorites. But, really, how good is it out of the gate?  Join us on the podcast for an unbiased first look at the place with one of our contributors, Randy Walker. Please don't treat this conversation as a fu...

Good Wednesday afternoon, and welcome to a super Detroit-y edition of your Daily Detroit. Today, we walked over to the Avenue of Fashion, where Mayor Mike Duggan came to speak about the streetscape redevelopment of a roughly 1-mile section of Livernois to calm traffic and make the commercial district more attractive to pedestrians and, hopefully, prosperous to business owners. Construction crews w...

Detroit: A great bike city, or the  best  bike city? We dive into that superwonky argument in the wake of Detroit's abysmal showing in PeopleForBike's annual rankings of the  Best Cities For Bikes in 2019 . Detroit scored a lowly 1.6 out of 5 stars, the same as 2018, despite all the work that's been done to install protected bike lanes, bike traffic counters and other bike-friendly infrastructure...

What is it with Greektown and the rise in shootings lately? We talk about that in the wake of another shooting late Sunday that injured two, though not critically. For years, the retail district was an example of safety and vibrancy in an otherwise dead downtown, but even though it's still technically a vibrant neighborhood — albeit much less Greek than it used to be — it's increasingly a scene of...