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tomo

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Posts posted by tomo

  1. The handover of Eastern Market couldn't happen soon enough, but it's great to hear it's a step closer! There's now a good chance that by this time next year Detroit'll have two highly bolstered tourist assets -- Mexicantown's welcome center and a week-long Eastern Market.

    resourcefulidiot, you are right about the metro area's great ethnic foods. It's what makes Detroit a big city. Thai restaurants everywhere, South Asian and Polish in Hamtramck, Vietnamese in Madison Heights (don't forget Windsor), even the occasional Filipino or Nepalese restaurant. ANY new restaurants in the Eastern Market district would help.

  2. thats it. f*** this city. safety cant even be taken for granted in one of the tamer areas of the town. People are still gettin killed left and right in this region, and our 'city leaders' just continue to beotch about their already extremely high pay.

    hes the third Detroit hip hop artist to die since November, and dont even start with the 'every rapper like this gets shot eventually' BS...

    Come on now, J Dilla died in L.A. from a medical condition. Eight Mile and Gratiot may be a tame area (where two highways intersect you're probably more likely to get injured in an auto accident than anything!) but apparently it's not so tame inside (illegal) afterhours clubs where people aren't searched for guns which they bring in... no matter where the club is. Maybe this is another reason for allowing bars to legally operate and serve alcohol later if they're willing to buy licenses to do so.

  3. There are far too many people in the region who think like your parents, Zachariah. And that is exactly why I think Detroit has so much hidden potential, there are all these dollars floating around the region and a change in perception is all it would take to flood downtown Detroit with them. The next generation of kids will be much more likely to visit Detroit regularly, of course, but there's still oppurtunity to bring back the older generation, the ones who haven't been downtown in 20 years. I'm sure no metro area has a higher portion of people like that and it's a huge untapped market.

  4. That building is the Capitol Square Building (not to be confused with the Capitol Park Building at Griswold & State). It was one of the many buildings in the area that was constructed by Sebastian Kresge. It is undergoing a very slow, low-cost renovation into lofts...they've been working on the building for about three years now, with very little visible progress in the last 6 months.

    Allan, can you expand on why it is a low-cost renovation? It there hope for renovating other unused buildings downtown, even the larger ones, in a low-cost way as well?

  5. I totally agree. Im just speaking to the longterm future. Call me crazy, but if whats going on now continues at its current rate, I see Detroit being the next major/notable American city after NYC, LA, and Chicago in the next 20-30 years...which would be complimented by new skyscrappers (eventually, and thats a long eventually). Boston and Philly may give us a run for our money

    A lot could happen in 30 years. Detroit could experience an economic and highrise boom like many newer large downtowns experienced in the latter part of the 20th century while they themselves stagnate. We could do what Toronto has done (much more highrises in Toronto than in Chicago). But first we need to catch up with those other cities, Boston and Philly, etc. Greater Downtown Detroit could be transformed easily just by moving around resources within the Metro Detroit region, but to go after Chicago or LA would require a new economy, like the one NextEnergy and TechTown are going after.

    Man, if all those people in the Corktown picture would MOVE there and start walking to those bars and restaurants and the stores (that would then be built for them) they'd lose at least a few percentages of that fat! I think what we need are more neighborhood dojos for kicking weight by kicking ass.

    Tapezord, is that the BCBS parking garage?

  6. Detroit is a pretty small city (tallest buidling is only 710feet!, even Cleveland has us beat) and lacks lots of big skyscappers or buisness buildings like Chicago has (for obvious reason). However I hope that will change in a while....Icant wait for our bright future

    Downtown Detroit would be improved by a bunch more tall midrises than any single new record-breaking skyscraper (we don't need another RenCen to concentrate and kill the office market, yet, and functionally it's more important what's happening at street level than in the sky). Key Tower in Cleveland is indeed quite tall and it dwarfs the rest of its downtown. I think a better measure of a skyline's height is the distribution of its tall buildings, e.g. the number of buildings over 100 meters (twice as many in Detroit). While there's not much most of us can do to get any new skyscrapers built, I do hope that new large companies decide to locate downtown and that smaller ones eventually grow into big ones and decide to expand their headquarters in new highrise office buildings rather than suburban campuses.

  7. Hamtramck and HP do have many differences today, besides the current rate of immigration. Race and poverty level are big ones. So is the retail makeup and suburbanite attractions.

    What are your ideas? Precedent for a city successfully building ethnic neighborhoods? The same tools could be used to preserve and strengthen the Hmong area in northwest Detroit and the small Vietnamese community in the southwest (somewhere).

  8. I would hope they would take an incredibly active role in trying to catch some of Hamtramck's immigrant spillover. That really is the difference between the two, at the moment. Immigrants are what saved Hamtramck from the fate HP has experienced.

    The problem that I see is that Highland Park's shared border with Hamtramck is quite small and it's entirely industrial. So it's not like people will simply move into houses that are right across the border, which they can do into Detroit to the north and east of Hamtramck. Not to mention a highway is basically Hamtramck's border to the west as well, further constraining residential expansion. In contrast to Hamtramck, HP does have some cool taller buildings that could one day be reused, plus it's right on Woodward. HP could definitely use a wave of immigrants...

  9. I'm not sure if anyone here has explored Detroit using Windows Live Local. It's kinda like google earth/mapquest/maps.google.com, etch with a satellite image from overhead. However, there is a birds eye view feature, that is awesome at capturing arial pictures from around the downtown area. Photos are high res and views are possible from all 4 cardinal directions. It does take a little bit of getting used to orienting through the interface. Though it is slightly outdated (appears to be summer '05 (statler demo, YMCA construction as evidence) I still played with this for about 5 hours, nonstop. High speed internet is an absolute must. Enjoy!!

    local.live.com

    For some reason the "Bird's Eye View" is unavailable. Perhaps I need to update the software. Does anyone know the url for updates?

    I was playing around with the bird's eye view (it only worked for Midtown and the north half of downtown) one day and then the next day it stopped working. This was a few weeks ago, and I noticed they had taken Detroit off the list of cities where bird's eye view was available. It appears to be working again, but still no bottom half of downtown and the images don't appear to have been updated.

    Wolverine, I would love to get a copy of the print out of this if you are able to make me one. I wrote a quick script to rip all the high res tiles from Windows Live of greater downtown Detroit (up to New Center) and assemble them as giant jpgs but when I tried to get Kinko's to print it out for me they refused due to copyright. :whistling:

  10. I consider everything covered by the Downtown Development Authority to be "downtown", which includes Tower Plaza as well as South U, I believe, but not the Packard/State area. It's all relative... if you're outside of Ann Arbor, it's all downtown, if you're a student living near South U, you'd differentiate it from the State Street area or Main Street or Kerrytown, etc. When I lived in Tower Plaza, I lived downtown, just like when my office was at State and Liberty.

    Wow, I really hope that proposed building happens. That old bank has sat underused for some time now.

  11. According to a university organization here on campus that renovates abandoned homes in Detroit, it costs about $10,000-20,000 depending on the house. I don't know if that's what they pay out of pocket since I'm sure they get funding from the university.. Are there $1 houses even available in midtown? I would only think you'd find those on the East Side.

    $10k ain't bad. Btw, can you tell me what this organization is, and it is at UofM (I see you are Wolverine from Ann Arbor so..)? Also, I want to make it clear that the stuff the city was selling was $1 per square foot not $1 total, so you're going to be paying a few thousand up front to the city. It's sad that someone who has the money and will to renovate a property in Midtown can't do so because the person who owns the abandoned building wants too much money for it.

  12. Got direct URL to this page? I browsed around the city site, but could not find it.

    Thanks.

    I thought I had it bookmarked but I can't find it. I just remember that the url begun with www.ci.detroit.mi.us. Someone more elite than myself should really scrape up all those addresses from the city of Detroit's website and link them up with Google Maps so you can quickly get an idea of where the abandoned properties for sale are.

  13. I thought about buying an abandoned house & fixing it up. The city has this program where they will sell you a house for $1 if you sign an agreement saying that you will make improvements to it. Unfortunately I don't have an unlimited supply of money at this point.

    Maybe my question is off topic but does anyone know how much it costs in material and how much it costs in labor to fix up an abandoned house? Could a team of say 10 buddies/do-gooders spend $100/each per month and work on a $1 house every weekend and get it renovated?

    I've seen the city of Detroit's website listing the properties it has for sale (iirc they were all $1/sqft) but didn't really recognize the addresses of any as being where I'd want to fix one up (Midtown, Southwest Detrot), and maybe all the properties in those areas are already owned by speculators who are just sitting on them.

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