Detroit Michigan.
Earlier I mentioned that Tom Kartsotis of Fossil fame had opened a new company in Detroit, Shinola, the first maker of high end American Watches in decades, and through his Bedrock Partners was encouraging a growing Entrepreneur spirit.
Recently Tom Gilbert the CEO of Quicken Loans has bought nine downtown buildings with his Rock Ventures subsidiary. The first new downtown tenant, Quicken Loans who moved from the suburbs and brought 1700 jobs into the city.
Twitter has opened an additional office in one of Gilbert's downtown buildings bring 373 more jobs.
Gilbert's efforts have brought 6500 new jobs to downtown Detroit and 100 small businesses and retailers. The advertising firm of Lowe Campbell and Edwards has also come back into the city from the suburbs.
Quicken is also subsidizing rents for new entrepreneurs engaged in industrial product design. Southern Michigan still has the highest concentration of industrial product developers in the world.
Also started a 140million dollar light rail line to link Downtown to the suburban Amtrak station.
On the drawing board 650 million dollar new home for the Detroit Red Wings and a new bridge to connect Detroit with neighboring Windsor Canada.
Ford motor company also has bought a digital radio start up, a high tech manufacturing institute has opened and the University of Michigan has opened a facility for the testing of driverless cars.
Just when you thought it was dead Detroit has become America's emerging market.
Too bad it happened after fifty years of democrat policies destroyed the city and forced it into bankruptcy. When will you liberals get it?
ReplyDeleteMoving jobs isn't a new job.
ReplyDeleteJust saying.
Cheap subsidized rent is a great motivator for a city and a wash for the state.
How to pay for a new bridge, new stadium a light rail link with no money. Maybe Uncle Sammy will pop for the cash with money he doesn't have.
Delete40 cents borrowed on each dollar. Hockey, a choo choo, and a bright shiny bridge to nowhereville. What a great concept. Keep the democrats and unions in charge and it will all turn to crap.
DeleteLou Gilbert's efforts have created 6500 new jobs. Why don't you learn to read, or do you just comprehend that which you want to instead of the whole shebang. You are just so sure that no jobs are being created anywhere that you look right over that.
DeleteWilliam you ever heard of municipal bonds. They pay for lots of things
DeleteYou are kidding right... Detroit is 10billion in debt. Their bonds last year were down graded from C to D because they missed payments. Previous to that, they had already stopped making good on payments to pension funds. Taxpayers in cities all over the country are getting hammered by bright spark city counsels creating enormous amounts of debt on future earnings.
DeleteScott, the fun continues in my old home town:
DeleteDETROIT — Detroit’s bankruptcy will culminate in a high-stakes court battle starting Tuesday that will determine the fate of the city’s plan, which would pay pensioners more than financial creditors, preserve the Detroit Institute of Arts and slash more than $7 billion in debt while reinvesting in services.
The city is facing extraordinary pressure to prove that its plan to resolve the bankruptcy and reinvest $1.4 billion over 10 years in services is fair.
The power to approve Detroit’s plan of adjustment or force the city to start over rests with U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes, who will examine hundreds of exhibits and hear testimony from potentially more than 80 witnesses during a trial that could stretch through Oct. 17.
As Rhodes put it, the proceeding — called a “plan confirmation hearing” — will determine “the future of the city of Detroit.”
The city’s feud with its holdout financial creditors will take center stage — with the powerful bond insurers attempting to prove the plan of adjustment is a disaster that must be rejected.
Winning the judge’s approval won’t be easy.
The cornerstone of Detroit’s restructuring plan is called the grand bargain, which would allow the city to accept the equivalent of $816 million over 20 years from the state of Michigan, nonprofit foundations and DIA donors to reduce pension cuts and transfer the museum to a charitable trust.
But the city’s most vociferous opponents — bond insurers Syncora and Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. (FGIC) — argue that the grand bargain is illegal and amounts to unfair discrimination in favor of pensioners.
When taking into account the grand bargain cash, Detroit pensioners would get about six times more than the insurers, according to the city’s financial calculations.
Syncora and FGIC also contend that Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr is frittering away the DIA for billions less than it’s worth.
But the city’s lawyers argue that the deal is fair in part because grand bargain funding was never intended for financial giants.
In addition, unequal doesn’t necessarily mean unfair. The city is expected to argue that Detroit pensioners deserve better treatment in part because they are relinquishing their right to sue the state and city over pension cuts. U.S. bankruptcy law allows different unsecured creditors to be treated differently if there’s justification to do so.
The causes Detroit's decline are very complex. People who care are working very hard to try and bring back what was once one of America's great cities. Why can't we support their efforts rather than trying to make political hay out of a sad situation?
ReplyDeleteEasy answer Mick. It was run by Blacks. But alas the emergency City manager who is helping make al this happen is Kevyn Orr a black man. Do you really think this bunch is going to rally round him.
ReplyDeleteIt's easier than that rick.
DeleteThe people elected corrupt politicians.
One Coleman Young fleeced the city for 2 armored limo's.
The list is endless of the transgressions of Coleman Young. Fortunately now deceased.
The latest was Kwame Kilpatrick.
Kwame Kilpatrick Verdict: Jury Convicts Former Detroit Mayor Of Corruption. Now in jail.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/kwame-kilpatrick-verdict-corruption-guilty_n_2853221.html
The unfortunate thing is people like yourself always scream racism instead of knowing the facts. want to discuss Detroit and the corrupt politics, I was there lived the dream.
As to your new jobs, as I stated, it's easy to lure new jobs in to an area with cheap/no cost rent. The real question, how many of the 6500 employees live in the city? Think the 6500 jobs paid auto union wages?
It's laughable as was the Flint jobs for lint rollers that replaced auto manufacturing.
As to Kevin Orr, he's doing a great job considering the conditions. To bad he has to turn it over when he cleans up the mess left from previous mayors to another mayor elected by the people as it's sure to end the same way. The outcome was expected as the mayors granted lavish retirement to city workers as well as healthcare. The Retirees loved the 13th paycheck every year.
Mick, some of the past few bother to read about:
DeleteDetroit has long been run by criminals. Former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, currently known as prisoner No. 44678-039 in the federal lockup at El Reno, Okla., ran an outright criminal enterprise out of City Hall, and was subsequently convicted on charges ranging from racketeering and extortion to bribery and fraud. He managed to make sewage even dirtier than it is, taking at least $1 million in kickbacks for contracts in the city’s water department. He also signed off on an odd and probably illegal deal to borrow money to make up for city’s habitual underfunding of its pension system, thereby creating a cascading series of problems that remain with the city and have complicated its attempt to restructure its affairs in bankruptcy.
This sorry tale features almost everything there is to hate about governance in these United States: rapacious public-sector unions, a feckless city council that apparently had no idea what it was signing off on, Wall Street banks looking to benefit from political maneuvering, promises of casino revenue, and lawyers — lots of lawyers. That and a mayor with two dozen felony-corruption counts now on his curriculum vitae.
Detroit, like many U.S. cities and states, uses its pension system as a tool for political patronage, but it does it on the cheap. It made extravagant promises about retirement benefits, and put aside very little to make good on those promises. And when the city’s institutions did find themselves with a little extra cash on hand, they habitually squandered it through a separate quasi-criminal enterprise, the so-called 13th-check payments under which public-sector retirees and non-retirees alike were written large bonus checks, on no obvious legal authority, depriving the pension system of some $2 billion in assets.
A little more:
DeleteNow the stupid comes quick and deep: Having looted its pension funds, the city found itself with insufficient money for meeting its promises to retirees. But it could not really walk away from those obligations: Michigan law says that those pensions have to be paid. Having a debt that it could not possibly pay, Detroit, under the leadership of Mayor Kilpatrick and a few Wall Street geniuses, hatched a scheme for Detroit to go into debt in order to pay the debt that Detroit could not pay. Detroit issued so-called pension obligation certificates of participation, basically pension-funding bonds, and those instruments had variable interest rates, putting the city at risk from an upward spike in interests rates. So, in order to protect itself, Detroit also made a big bet on interest-rate swaps to hedge against rising interest rates. Interest rates collapsed, and the city found itself in hock to UBS and Bank of America to the tune of some $400 million.
Detroit couldn’t make that payment, so it came up with another ingenious plan worthy of Wile E. Coyote: It offered the banks a deal under which its debt would be converted from an unsecured to a secured obligation, i.e., into a debt that has to be paid off during bankruptcy. That secured debt would be backed by real money, with Detroit pledging its future casino revenues to make good on it. That was enough to buy off the Wall Street guys, and to allow them, in turn, to insure themselves against taking a bath on the deal, a service provided to them by a Bermuda-based firm, Syncora Guarantee, which , as a consequence of all of this boneheadedness coming unwound, is today the city’s principal remaining adversary in its bankruptcy case.
Where things get funny is here: Detroit’s advocates have argued, among other things, that the city should try to “claw back” some of those 13th-check payments under “fraudulent conveyances” rules, that the promise of dedicating casino revenues to back the bailout of the pension-funding scheme was illegal and that the city should not, therefore, be held to it — and also that “alleged historical mismanagement or misconduct” of the pension system is legally irrelevant and should be excluded from the bankruptcy hearings in that it would prejudice the judge against the city and “waste precious trial time and judicial resources.” Translation: It was a crime, so you can’t blame us — even though we’re the perpetrators.
Sports stadiums as a method of urban regeneration bother me. The monopolistic nature of a sports league provides a scarcity of teams throughout the country, coupled with increased ability to move franchises at minimal cost, has dramatically impacts the bargaining power of host cities. They must bear increasing burden of expense, not only for infrastructure but stadium facilities itself.
ReplyDeleteThis deal, while it may be a catalyst that revitalizes the area is a huge gamble to the taxpayer in a lot of ways. Beyond the infrastructure the Development corp is financing almost the entire cost of the stadium with the owner putting 200 million in surrounding businesses (big win for the owners as the immediate venue is what rakes in the money). The city advertises no taxes will be removed from the 'general fund' so while the remaining city services aren't impacted the development corp has taxing authority all on it own. The taxpayer, already burdened, will see a significant tax hike.
The other BIG gable is the light rail. This light rail is meant to serve the Amtrak station. Currently the Amtrak line between Detroit and Chicago is subsidized at the rate of about $50 per passenger ticket. The federal government is trying to devolve all of its lines to the states (except for the profitable northeast corridor) This will only increase the tax burden on the state for a railroad that can't pull its own weight and the stadium traffic is unlikely to change that. The state is also on the hook of removing the old stadium. A big win for the franchise owners... only time will tell if it does anything for Detroit.
Sports stadiums enrich one person, the owner. We built a new stadium for the owner who threatened to move the team and the value of the team more than doubled over night.
DeleteLight rail, a true boondogle. The cost per trip unsubsidized over 30 bucks a ticket. The subsidized cost, 5 bucks one way. Who benefits, the land owners around the light rail stations.
One of rail transit’s dirty secrets is that the entire system - rails, cars, electrical facilities, stations - must be replaced, rebuilt or rehabilitated roughly every 30 years.
This costs almost as much as the original construction, which means for taxpayers that rails are a “pay now, pay more later” proposition.
The Chicago Transit Authority is on the verge of financial collapse. The agency estimates it needs $16 billion it doesn’t have to rehabilitate tracks and trains.
To keep the trains running, the agency siphoned money away from the city’s bus system and lost a third of its bus riders between 1986 and 1996.
Newer systems face other financial challenges. San Jose’s light-rail system put the city’s transit agency so far in debt that when sales tax revenues fell short early in this decade, it was forced to cut bus and rail service by 20 percent.
Rail construction almost always costs more than the original estimates.
Denver voters approved a 119-mile rail system in 2004 on the promise that it would cost $4.7 billion to build it by 2017. The current estimate is up to $7.9 billion, and the regional transit agency says the system might not be complete until 2034. Yes the construction to the Airport continues. Think people on the south side will want to ride light rail downtown, change trains to catch a train to the airport? Thing they will want to do the same when they get back home from vacation?
In Newark we got a shiny new hockey stadium, we got a shiny new soccer stadium, we got a shiny new performing arts center, we got an Amtrack line, we got a world class sea port, we got a world class airport NRK, we got Zuckerburg donating 100M for education, we
ReplyDeletegot Shaq building stuff, we got the Jersey Turnpike running through town, we got bridges to the biggest city in the world,,,
We got Democrat politicians, we got big unions, we got union controlled newspapers, we got Democrat representation in Congress and the State house,,,,
We got, we got, we got,,, we ain't got crap as long as the people who live here always vote 90% for the same corrupt situation,,, we got insanity is what we got.
In my hometown they built a stadium downtown for a minor league class A team and it greatly enhanced the downtown area. That town is sometimes referred to as little Detroit. Dayton Ohio, and the Dayton Dragons have drawn tons of people to the downtown area. A downtown that was almost as down trodden as Detroit. The Dayton Dragons previously known as the Rockford Reds came to Dayton in 2000 with the building of the new fifth third stadium right smack in the middle of the worst of downtown Dayton the abandoned crumbling GM factories. Today the Dayton Dragons hold and continue to extend the record for most sellout crowds at 815 consecutive games. The stadium seats 8200 and they have squeezed as many as 9500 in it during the 2009 Midwest League season. During the 2004 season the Dragons drew 593,000 to the ballpark and downtown area. The Dragons were sold out their first season before they ever played a game. . Although some of the game day food is contracted much of it is served by local church and charities as a way to raise funds for their work. Yes a great venue in a supportive city can make a difference. And yes Dayton is democratically run. I posted not long ago here how the city began to welcome immigrants and quit the harassment of these people.
ReplyDeleteYes we built a shiny new Baseball stadium on the taxpayers dime. As it was paid for, the owner of the Football demanded a new stadium or he would move the team. He got his new stadium along with all revenues for football and any other venue using the stadium. He has all revenue from concessions, parking, programs and anything else related to the stadium. the city got a 3 buck seat tax. The Burbs who pay the taxes to pay for the stadium got nothing. The owner doubled the value of his team from over 200 million to 450 million. A win win for the owner.
ReplyDeleteThe Hockey team wanted a new area for the hockey and basketball team. They built it them selves. The city wanted a 3 buck seat tax, the owner said bite me as they should have.
We're on the verge of driver less cars that will multiply the capacity of highways and we've got these "progressives" touting the advantages of choo choo's with two hundred year old technology and the massive debt that goes along with them.
ReplyDeleteRead "Flash Boys" and learn about the routing of information through a hub and spoke system versus the emerging cloud systems of today. A train track was great in the 1800's and symbolizes the straight line thinking of central planners, (read progressives, democrats, socialists,,,).
The Tigers should relocate to North Dakota and rename themselves the "Oilers." Detroit will remain a waste land for another hundred years.
Why would they. The Tigers are the longest running 1 city 1 name franchise in the American League. The owner Mitch Ilitch is a Detroit boy past owner of Little Caesars Pizza and current owner of the Tigers and the Red Wings. If that notion ever crossed his mind Tom Gilbert and Rock Ventures would buy them. The Tigers are the one bright spot in the city since it fell on hard times. Ty Cobb Hank Greenburg, Charlie Gehringer of the ancient past, the last 30 game winner in Denny McLain, Mickey Lolich, and who can forget the birdman, Mark Fidrych. Al Kaline one of the all time greats. In today,s game the first triple crown winner in 45 years, Miguel Cabrera who is not stoked up on steroids, (at least not proven yet). And the first starting rotation with 3 Cy Young award winners ever, Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and David Price. Obviously great players of yesterday and today don't mind playing for the Tigers in Detroit. The brightest spot for the city........for now. oh and full disclosure I am not a Tigers fan I tend to go for the Ohio team the Cincinnati Reds as disappointing as they may be.
ReplyDeleteThe Department of Justice is giving liberal activist groups money from a $16.6 billion settlement with Bank of America, Judicial Watch reports.
ReplyDeleteThe groups benefiting from the lawsuit, according to Investor’s Business Daily, are the National Council of La Raza, Operation Hope, National Community Reinvestment Coalition and Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. The money also went to “delinquent borrowers” in Chicago, Oakland, Detroit, Philadelphia and other major “Democrat strongholds.”
“This is a wealth redistribution scheme disguised as a lawsuit,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told The Daily Caller. “And who benefits from the distribution? Interest groups the administration relies on, outside interest groups, allies and politicians in communities trying to benefit as well.”
Fitton noted that these liberal groups are basically what’s left of the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now (ACORN) network, and that President Barack Obama has ties to ACORN.
“You have La Raza that’s getting money, their former head is at the White House in a top position whose funding from the feds has gone up immensely under the Obama administration,” Fitton said.
La Raza, Operation Hope, National Community Reinvestment Coalition and Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America have all intimidated banks to give loans to minorities, even if they can’t afford to pay them back.
This is part of an ongoing scheme in which the DOJ puts the money it has received from bank settlements in a slush fund and then funnels the money to liberal groups. Judicial Watch points out that liberal groups — many of which are the same ones benefiting from this lawsuit — also received money from multi-billion dollar settlements from JP Morgan Chase and Citibank, as well as a $335 million settlement from Countrywide Financial Corporation.
“What we need is an honest Justice Department run by people who make a commitment to the rule of law rather using their power to extort and benefit more government and their political allies,” Fitton said. “This is no better than Tammany Hall.”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/28/doj-to-give-money-from-bank-of-america-settlement-to-liberal-activist-groups/#ixzz3CBh8O9a5
And this has to do with Detroit how? Wow you talk about off topic this mishmash is not even close.
ReplyDeleteDetroit is mentioned in the article bozo. More free money to sustain the failed policies and corruption of our democrat-union controlled inner cities.
Delete