Shinola is not alone. In 2009, suburban businessman John Hantz proposed turning vacant Detroit parcels into a productive commercial farming operation. After years of effort and investment, he finally got permission to build a hardwood-tree farm on 15 noncontiguous acres. At his own expense, Hantz beautified his property and started planting high-quality, mature trees. “It took me five years and $1 million to get the right to mow the lawns that hadn’t been mowed in 15 years,” he told Crain’s Detroit Business. While bureaucratic bungling played a key role in the delays, his operation also had to face down critics who derided it as a “land grab.” This pisses me off. Who gives a shit if the financiers are from Texas and are importing parts from china to make their $5k bicycles that say "Detroit" on them? (not that any of that is true...) Who gives a shit? There are 250 jobs IN DETROIT now. Who cares about the rest? It's fucking idiotic. We wish there were jobs here and manufacturing here... but just not those ones. Fuck off detractors. Guess what? You lived there for years and it fell in to ruin, you don't get to complain now, in fact you ought to step aside and let some progress occur.Consider Shinola, a luxury-goods start-up that employs more than 250 people in Detroit, many engaged in the manufacturing of bicycles, leather goods, and watches. The firm has opened boutiques in New York and London and is running multipage ads in upscale magazines, boasting of its Detroit connection. But not everybody sees Shinola as a Detroit success story. “Shinola is using my city as its shill, pushing a manufactured, outdated and unrealistic ideal of America,” wrote Detroit native John Moy on Four Pins, a fashion website. He complains about Shinola’s out-of-town financial backers and its use of parts made elsewhere. When Shinola installed four outdoor city clocks, someone tagged them with graffiti.
This is so typical of Detroit, and I hope I can believe the current mayor at his word that things like this will stop going forward. There are a group of guys here who got a cease and desist order form the city a while back, because they had been mowing the old Tiger Stadium field in order that they could have a place to play soft ball on Sundays (not to mention that they kept it up as a park for the poor neighborhood kids, as well). I was one of a very few Detroiters who would speak openly about supporting the bankruptcy fully, and I think it looks like it was a very good choice for the city. The status quo sucked--it still sucks, but it's improving. One positive that's happening is that the city is seizing abandoned homes, and selling them at next to nothing to anyone who signs a contract that they will live there and maintain the property. It looks like a drop in the bucket when you examine the numbers, but I think it shows a commitment to trying to shed the image of being a giant road block. We can't have a thriving city whose primary business model is graft, bribery, thuggery, and inefficiency. I know we've gone back and forth about Shinola's marketing, but you won't ever hear me saying that any type of job in the city is a bad one. We need to move past just restaurants and bars to create real, sustainable growth, which is the only way to move past the cycle of poverty and decay (and don't get me wrong, the more bars and restaurants, the merrier--we just need more than them). Edit: The article isn't totally right when they refer to Hantz as a suburban business man. He might live in the 'burbs, but he owens a large business in the city, so he has every incentive and every right to neighborhood improvement as anyone else.It took me five years and $1 million to get the right to mow the lawns that hadn’t been mowed in 15 years.
Indeed. I'm not sure I understand what a company may use as marketing without tacit disapproval from someone, somewhere who will trip you up and laugh when you fall. Or maybe this whole thing is just great marketing for Shinola. I have looked at a set of screw-drivers of theirs because they looked cool. But I have screwdrivers. And I have a bicycle. And I wish they made a watch that was automatic winding like a Seiko 9S85. Dressed up in their skins I might get one. I hope that Detroit reclaims more intra-urban space to agriculture. Now that would be something I would so and see for a summer vacation.
From an investment standpoint, I'm all for Detroit. Right now it seems a bit speculative, but I think there could really be something here. Eh, the cold is a problem... I currently live in Florida, and we're seeing an influx of people from up north -- they're just tired of the snow. Right now it's 72* outside, and the northeast just got pounded by a crazy storm. Either way, houses are dirt cheap in Detroit. I'd buy one and rent it out.