While Cleveland is struggling with foreclosures, Detroit is becoming an artist destination chronicled in this NY Times op-ed, For Sale: The $100 House:
A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn’t the craziest idea. The neighborhood is almost, sort of, half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.
I’ve often thought about the feasibility of getting all my friends together and move en-mass to some city on the precipice of despair such as Detroit (or maybe somewhere warmer?) colonizing (let’s call it what it is) the land creating a new urban typology. There must be a tipping point where the micro-economies of hundreds of artists interweave to form a larger sustainable economy.
Detroit Unrealestate Agency is a local blog detailing the artist takeover. While not classically gentrification (artification??) I think a new term has to be found for people like Andrew Kemp who farms and tends his beehives on five lots in East Detroit.
