News

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Being an artist in America doesn't have to mean living in a shoebox on a coast with nothing but the pennies you make at your day job to support an artistic endeavor. Contrary to popular lore, the U.S. is home to many artistic cities aside from the requisite stops of New York and Los Angeles.  

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Read the news these days and it’s all doom and gloom out of Detroit. Last October’s municipal bankruptcy, the largest in American history, ignited a firestorm of bad press. Just this week, the Blight Removal Task Force, convened by Barack Obama after the bankruptcy, reported that the city has 40,000 vacant buildings in need of demolition to a tune of $2 billion. Meanwhile, GM, one of the “big three” automakers that made Detroit the industrial powerhouse of the 20th century, is on the hook for a manufacturing defect that has claimed 13 lives.

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Debates about gentrification notwithstanding, watching a blighted area get a new lease on life can be awfully heartening. We've listed a few of the most promising and unlikely rebirths below.

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The mayor of New Orleans says the country should rally around Detroit the same way it rallied in support of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Mayor Mitch Landrieu says the country needs Detroit to succeed.

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Find out how this organization is not only keeping kids active with the sport of squash, but also helping them grow academically.

Watch the video here. 

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For the last few years, the automotive presence at CES has gone from noticeable to taking over. In January of this year, there was so much car tech at CES that I watched a Bosch technology that allowed a car to park itself, drove a smart car that connected not only to a smart phone but to a smart watch, tried inductive chargers built into vehicles, and evaluatedin-car app marketplaces. Intel, Qualcomm, Apple, Google, and other tech companies are developing technologies specifically for automobiles. Cars are already pretty technical, with lane-keep technologies that correct your driving if you drift, radar that can anticipate an accident ahead, and sensors that can “see” obstacles in your path. But the future car will be so technically endowed that it will not only be able to heal itself by updating code from the Internet, drive itself, and communicate with other cars as you fly down the freeway.

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No one really knew for certain what Madonna was up to when pictures of her kept popping up on social media from places like The Heidelberg Project, Downtown Boxing Gym, Detroit Achievement Academy and The Empowerment Plan but it definitely got people talking. 

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The real-life version of Sunshine Cleaning is playing out in Detroit's Cody Rouge neighborhood.

For those who haven't seen the 2008 comedy-drama, the gist is a young single-mom (Amy Adams) starts a crime-scene cleanup business to support her family. Check out the trailer here. In the real-world Detroit-version, Shena Penn is the entrepreneurial hero who helps people during the most profound and often saddest experiences of their lives.

Penn graduated from Wayne State University with a journalism degree in 2010 and landed a job with a medical research firm in Ann Arbor. She had to get up at 3 a.m. to be at work by 5 a.m. each day. Raising a young child by herself, Penn lasted about eight months on the job before she knew she had to find a different way.

"The hours really weren’t conducive to family life," Penn says. "I wanted to find a way to make money and spend more time with my family."

That's when she started Pure Decontamination, a crime scene cleanup company, from her home in Cody Rouge in 2012. Penn enjoyed cleaning and the barriers of entry to the business were low. It was a good fit for an ambitious young woman who didn’t have an overabundance of family resources to rally.

Pure Decontamination started as a side gig while Penn got a new day job working at Quicken Loans. She also leveraged the entrepreneurial training resources at ProsperUS Detroit to help build her fledgling business. Penn quit her Quicken Loans job a month ago to pursue building Pure Decontamination on a full-time basis.

"You have to choose either (your day job or building your own business) or get no sleep," Penn says.

Today Penn is working toward her MBA and has a staff of 10 independent contractors working under her. She is focused on building Pure Decontamination in the tri-county area, securing contracts with local municipalities, and getting the word out about her business.

"We would really like to push ourselves at this point to make sure people know we are available," Penn says.

Source: Shena Penn, owner of Pure Decontamination
Writer: Jon Zemke

Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.

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It is the height of irony that Tyson Gersh is shy a handful of credits until he graduates from the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

At 24, the president of one the fastest-growing, most successful Detroit nonprofits that hardly anybody (over 30 years old anyway) has ever heard of, is short a French class and another class he could probably teach blindfolded.

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Applications for both the $10k Challenge and $100k Challenge opened on May 8, 2014. Online applications are available on the site. Printed applications are available at NEIdeas Ambassador locations.

Apply here. 

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Originally from the Detroit area, Brian and Stacy Mulloy were working in the tech industry in San Francisco when they decided to move back to the Motor City.

By doing so, they were traversing one of the largest gaps in real estate value among major U.S. cities.

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Paloma Vega-Perez spent more than a decade in the trenches for Louis Vuitton, helping the luxury bag maker with production in Barcelona and Los Angeles.

Now she's in Detroit, launching Shinola/Detroit LLC's line of leather goods.

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Rachel Lutz has a word for them: Been-ups.

These companies are the ones already here silently toiling, unremembered and uncelebrated, watching as the resources, support and capital focus on startups.

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Standing in the historic grandeur that is the Masonic Temple in Detroit, Stephanie Meeks, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, made the case for preservation as an economic boost for U.S. cities.

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This is definitely the video to show to anyone who questions the beauty of Detroit, the reality of life in its downtown, or its ability to rise from the ashes to become great once again.

Watch the video here.