Gary Anglebrandt CommunicationsStraight-up news reporting
US stock prices continued to rise on Monday in a streak not matched since 1987. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a record high for a 12th straight session, at 20,837 points. 
US President Donald Trump in an address to Congress on Tuesday night in Washington DC ran through many of his favorite topics – immigration, jobs, infrastructure, taxes and deregulation. But one of the favorite targets of his campaign – China – was only mentioned once, and followed a general lament over the loss of American manufacturing jobs.
They used to just be called cell phones, mobiles, or even more simply – phones.
Now, the cell phones of a decade ago have picked up the unglamorous nickname of “dumbphones”, thanks to the ubiquity of the smartphone that’s risen since.
Many places in metro Detroit can strike a person as feeling like the real heart of the area. Woodward and Jefferson, Eight Mile, Grosse Pointe with its old money, Dearborn with its entanglement with Ford Motor Co. Oakland County has its moments.
But there’s something about Downriver. Poor, downtrodden, derided Downriver. It’s long been the butt of jokes for locals of the greater Detroit area, for reasons I only partially get, having come from the other far end of the area, Port Huron, another waterfront place that isn’t exactly known as a bastion of high culture.
I heard there was a GOP presidential debate in Detroit last night.
You might think it appalling that I’m so out of touch I didn’t know until yesterday afternoon that one was even scheduled. And I’m in the news business. Shameful!
But really, what did I miss? As I have told several people recently, “The debates are one step above television commercials, or Honey Boo Boo.” I haven’t watched a single debate, and I don’t feel the slightest bit less enlightened because of it.
If the past year is any indication, the future of Bagger Dave’s Burger Tavern is anything but in the bag.
The Southfield-based restaurant chain suffered the indignity of two rounds of restaurant closings in 2015. The first came in August, when parent company Diversified Restaurant Holdings Inc. shuttered three locations, all in Indiana, gnawing $1.8 million in writedowns off the corporate books.
Then in December, eight more locations closed, at a loss of about $10.7 million for writedowns and other costs. One of them was its downtown Detroit location. The others were in Indiana.
“Eastern Market gets hot,” read the front page of the Dec. 23, 1985, issue of Crain’s Detroit Business.
The story was about a spike in demand for properties as food companies built more warehouse space.
It’s a headline that would work just as well now. Retailers regularly announce shop openings in the district. The Saturday public market has grown under the management of Eastern Market Corp., the nonprofit established by the city in 2006. When TV advertisers co-opt the gritty Detroit comeback narrative, they never fail to include a shot of an Eastern Market shed.
The former DTE Energy Co. coal-fired power plant in Marysville fell Saturday morning as its 12 stories were imploded to make way for riverfront development.
The 300,000-square-foot plant on the banks of the St. Clair River carried the nickname the “Mighty Marysville.”
Check out this video of the implosion from the scene.
Michigan has gotten the hint: Employers need STEM-trained workers.
Efforts have been made to plug the gap by lots of stakeholders — high schools, community colleges, employer groups, nonprofits, workforce agencies, foundations and businesses. Yet the need for specific kinds of workers still exists.
“The issue has been out there long enough for people to have an understanding of it,” said Gary Farina, executive director of the Michigan STEM Partnership in Lansing. “It’s on their radar, and they’re out there seeing what they can do.”
After two people at the company confirmed the deal, it issued a statement saying “it is our policy not to comment on speculation or rumors.”
Fundrise specializes in real estate projects, investing its own money into them. It then funds this investment through sales of “project payment dependent notes,” which are directly tied to Fundrise’s preferred equity stake in the real estate project. Investors buy them through the Fundrise website and gain or lose according to the performance of the notes.
In effect, investors are buying interest-bearing securities issued by Fundrise, not the entity behind the real estate project being funded. As the issuer, Fundrise, not the real estate developer, is responsible for managing investor disclosure and reporting requirements.
Though it is registered with the state as a MILE website operator, it has not used MILE rules, or any other state’s intrastate crowdfunding mechanism, for any deals and does not plan to do so. Intrastate rules put fundraising companies at too much risk of running afoul of federal securities laws, said Fundrise President Dan Miller. “We’re now focused on (using) federal rules” for the legal framework of its deals, he said.
Fundrise has done about 35 deals since its launch in 2010. None of them has been in Michigan, but it’s in talks with local developers about using its crowdfunding platform for projects in the state. Because of federal rules on soliciting securities, and because the agreements are still being hashed out, Fundrise can’t say precisely which properties are under discussion. But Miller said talks are ongoing over 10 deals and four of those “are a little further along than talking.” He expects to close on those four this year.
Among those four properties are a Corktown warehouse that would be converted to restaurant and retail use; an empty downtown Detroit building of more than 30 stories that would be put to retail, restaurant and possibly hotel use; and a property near Great Lakes Coffee in Midtown that would have restaurant or retail on the ground floor and apartments in the upper levels.
The fourth project is the redevelopment of the former Tiger Stadium property. Fundrise and Bloomfield Hills-based developer Larson Realty Group last month announced a possible crowdfunding angle to the project. The crowdfunding portion of the capital raise would take place in fall and have a cap of $500,000, or 10 percent of the project’s preferred equity. The agreement between Fundrise and Larson has not been finalized, though, so the details could change.
For all four deals, Miller said the goal is to arrange the offerings so investors can participate for as little as $100.
The purchase last month of the Martinizing national dry-cleaning chain has more than doubled the size of a local dry-cleaning franchisor, making it the country’s largest.
Berkley-based The Huntington Co. LLC manages a slew of dry-cleaning-related entities and brands owned by partners Wayne Wudyka and Jeffrey Snyder. A steady march of acquisitions and launches already had made this family of companies one of the largest in the business.
Detroit-based Detroit Bikes LLC launched a second product line this month, one year after starting its first.
The “B-Type” model bicycle is an all-white, step-through bike that sells for $699. Company owner Zak Pashak has set a sales target of 1,000 by year’s end.
The company spent two years preparing for the launch of the company’s first bike model, the all-black A-Type, which also sells for $699.
Pashak, a Canadian citizen, came to Detroit in October 2010, following a failed run for city office in his native Calgary. He used proceeds from business investments in Canada to build Detroit Bikes.
His staff of 10 works out of a 50,000-square-foot west side industrial building Pashak bought in 2012 for $190,000. He plans to hire another five to 10 people in the next two months.
Detroit Bikes’ run at the bicycle business has been harder than expected. Crain’s first reported on the company in April 2012, when Pashak expected it would cost $400,000 to get his company up and running by the end of that year.
Instead it cost $2 million to start rolling bikes out the door by August 2013, and another $500,000 since.
The plant has the capacity to produce 40,000 bikes a year. The company’s goal was to sell 10,000 A-Types in the first 12 months.
Sales have fallen well short of that goal, at 1,000.
“It’s going to take some time for people to trust our brand and hear our story,” Pashak said last week. “Retailers are risk averse. We need to be around for a while longer.”
Pashak also told Crain’s last year he planned to sell the A-Type for $550. Middleman fees prompted the price increase after Detroit Bikes entered a national distribution deal.
“Also, looking at the market, I think we were undervaluing the bike. I thought we priced ourselves too low,” Pashak said.
Shinola, which in addition to assembling watches in Detroit does the same with bicycles, said it produced about 1,000 bikes in 2013. The company would not disclose its sales targets last year, nor would it disclose actual sales figures for 2013 or sales targets for 2014 when asked last week. The company’s three models are priced at either $1,950 or $2,950, depending on the model.
Detroit Bikes’ B-Type’s more realistic sales target of 1,000 — compared to the A-Type’s original target of 10,000 — reflects a dose of learning curve for the company.
“It’s hard to explode into mass production,” Pashak said.
The company is working to land international distribution deals to give sales a shot in the arm.
Detroit Bikes also plans to come out with a “C-Type” bike within a year.
Call it the physician assistant’s paradox.
Health care organizations want them and students want to be them, which seems to present the perfect picture for growth. But there’s a bump in the road of supply and demand when it comes to the PA profession, and industry professionals expect it to stay that way for some time.
The reason? There aren’t enough places for PAs to get clinical rotations — essential on-the-job training required to become a medical professional. And because of the problem, universities are reluctant to either start new programs or expand existing ones.
“It’s a tough dilemma,” said John McGinnity, who took over the directorship of Wayne State University‘s PA program in June and president of the American Academy of Physician Assistants in Alexandria, Va.
It’s a particularly frustrating problem for PAs and the medical profession in general, given the substantial cost savings PAs can deliver at a time when society is pushing for cuts in health care costs. Physician assistants can perform most of the same tasks as a doctor, as long as they’re under the direction of one, helping health care organizations save money as PAs earn about half the income of physicians.
And PAs work across the spectrum of medical specialties. Strong areas include family practice, surgical specialties and continuous care, said Andrew Booth, director of physician assistant studies at Grand Valley State University. About 40 percent of the school’s PA graduates go into primary care or family practice.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the demand for physician assistants to increase by 38 percent from 2012 to 2022, pushed upward by an aging population, a shortage of doctors and an increase in the number of insured people under the Affordable Care Act.
This has not gone unnoticed by prospective students. When Eastern Michigan Universitylaunched its program, it received more than 600 applications for the 20 spots available.
That’s not unusual. The five other schools in Michigan all report receiving hundreds of applications every year for programs that have 40 or 50 openings. Grand Valley receives 350-450 applications for its program of 48 slots; Western Michigan University receives 700 for its 36 to 40 openings and has seen the number spike to as high as 1,200.
The number of PA programs nationally has jumped from about 80 to 187 in the past decade, said Jay Peterson, director of Eastern’s program, launched in May after the school spent $3.6 million on renovations to Rackham Hall, where the program is housed.
“Interest in the PA profession has exploded,” he said.
Some university programs have an “in” at particular health systems.
Beaumont Health System provides slots for clinical rotations with many schools, including Wayne State and Western Michigan, and always has openings for what it calls “midlevel providers,” a category that includes nurse practitioners as well as physician assistants, said Linda Kruso, director of workforce planning.
“Both are vital roles to rounding out the team to ensure we’re able to provide for care,” Kruso said.
Beaumont has openings for 12 to 15 midlevel providers, a typical number at any given moment. An aging society pushes demand for physician assistants and nurse practitioners in two ways, Kruso said. Besides prompting more health care needs as people get older, it also leads to more doctors retiring.
This is creating a big need in primary care as more doctors wind down their practices while freshly minted doctors coming out of school gravitate toward better-paying specialty practices.
“Physician assistants and nurse practitioners are sometimes referred to as ‘physician extenders.’ They are a way of extending access to care through having teams,” Kruso said.
Eastern’s program brings Michigan’s PA program count to six. None of the other schools plans to increase their program size except for Grand Valley, which plans to add a 12-person program to its Traverse City regional center, with an expected opening in fall 2015. Although Grand Valley has increased the number of slots at its main program in Grand Rapids from 30 to 48 since 2007, it has no plans to further increase it.
“The great limiting factor for any PA program is the availability of clinical rotation sites,” Booth said.
That factor has kept Wayne State from increasing the number of students in its program, which is a perennial topic of discussion, said Stephanie Gilkey, who directed Wayne State’s PA program for 10 years until June. The school always is on the lookout for more hospitals and clinics to place students, but that’s just to keep pace with its current number of students.
“We’d love to increase enrollment. We probably could double it if we could prove we have enough clinical rotations,” Dereczyk said.
Eastern knew it was jumping into an already crowded pool when it opened its program this year. EMU plans to increase its PA program size to 30 students next year and to top it out at 40 the next year, to make sure it doesn’t end up with more students than places to send them for their second-year rotations.
The school also committed $1.1 million toward a new Advanced Medical Simulation Center (finished) and Human Anatomy Cadaver Laboratory (to be opened in May 2015) housed at the nearby St. Joseph Mercy Ann Arbor hospital. The lab and center are meant to give students an advantage when seeking rotations because they’ll have more experience with lifelike situations.
The Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant Inc. in Johns Creek, Ga., is the accrediting body for university PA programs. There are 64 schools in the country that have applied or indicated they plan to apply for accreditation. No Michigan schools are on the list.
But competition is probably going to increase eventually since the trends pushing demand for PAs show no sign of letting up. Dereczyk expects more Michigan schools to seek accreditation sooner or later.
“You always have rumors, but there’s nothing in the pipeline. The reality is that universities are going to apply for PA programs,” Dereczyk said.
She said Oakland University, which opened a medical school in 2011 and is affiliated with Beaumont, might see opportunity in such a program, and that it’s surprising University of Michigan, a school known for its medical program, doesn’t have one already.
“They have a nurse practitioner program. It’s curious they don’t have a physician assistant program,” Dereczyk said.
The lack of clinical training slots has limited UM’s focus to training advance practice nurses and physicians, according to a statement from UM media relations. OU said it does not have a PA program in the works right now but that it could be something the school looks into in the future.
“A feasibility study was done about adding a PA program and it indicated there was some concern over adequate clinical rotation space. Since then, developing a PA program has moved to the back burner,” said Brian Bierley, OU’s director of media relations, in a statement.
Dereczyk, who is on Eastern’s PA advisory board, said she’s not worried about the school’s new program worsening the clinical rotation situation in Michigan. Health systems tend to support local schools; Eastern has its place in Washtenaw County and UDM has its place in Wayne, she said.
What she finds more frustrating is the lack of funding for PA programs despite the increasing demand for them. Medical student programs get federal funding support that PA programs do not, she said.
“There’s demand for PAs and a projected physician shortage, yet there’s not a real big push to educate us or train us. We could get out of the pipeline quicker,” Dereczyk said.
Tony Miller, chief policy officer at the Physician Assistant Education Association, a lobbying organization on Alexandria, Va., said it’s a tricky situation. Health systems clearly want the PAs, as evidenced by the excess of job offers students receive. But they have a hard time making way for students because of the extra costs and also because medical students and others are all vying for slots, and they’re all coming at the health systems in increasing numbers, too.
The problem is new enough that PAEA is still looking into what exactly it thinks should be done to give students a hand. There is federal graduate medical education money that funds resident medical students. Conceivably, similar funding could support PA students, but given the budgetary mood in Washington these days, that’s unlikely.
“There’s no love in Congress to pay for any kind of education,” Miller said.
Washington also does not like the idea of giving more money directly to health systems when they already receive Medicare funding, he said. “By my discussions with some officials at the federal government, that’s not encouraged,” Miller said.
Some schools pay stipends to health systems to defray training costs. The PAEA doesn’t see that as a sustainable option, though, because it feeds into tuition increases and then higher health care costs — the very thing hiring a PA is supposed to help prevent.
There is a pot of money at U.S. Department of Health and Human Services designated for PA training that, although beset by cutbacks, could be used in a way that avoids a direct handout to health systems or cause tuition spikes: Give it to students willing to travel to faraway rural areas that have shortages of health care professionals. Students who can’t find sites in metro Detroit could head to the Upper Peninsula to do their work, their travel and lodging costs defrayed by the financial support.
“It helps to get more physician assistants to rural, underserved areas,” Miller said.
Employment in thousands 2012: 86.7
Employment in thousands 2022: 120.0
Change by number: 33.3
Change by percentage: 38.4%
Job openings due to growth and replacement needs, 2012-22: 48.9
2012 median annual wage 2012: $90,930
Call it the physician assistant’s paradox.
Health care organizations want them and students want to be them, which seems to present the perfect picture for growth. But there’s a bump in the road of supply and demand when it comes to the PA profession, and industry professionals expect it to stay that way for some time.
The reason? There aren’t enough places for PAs to get clinical rotations — essential on-the-job training required to become a medical professional. And because of the problem, universities are reluctant to either start new programs or expand existing ones.
“It’s a tough dilemma,” said John McGinnity, who took over the directorship of Wayne State University‘s PA program in June and president of the American Academy of Physician Assistants in Alexandria, Va.
It’s a particularly frustrating problem for PAs and the medical profession in general, given the substantial cost savings PAs can deliver at a time when society is pushing for cuts in health care costs. Physician assistants can perform most of the same tasks as a doctor, as long as they’re under the direction of one, helping health care organizations save money as PAs earn about half the income of physicians.
And PAs work across the spectrum of medical specialties. Strong areas include family practice, surgical specialties and continuous care, said Andrew Booth, director of physician assistant studies atGrand Valley State University. About 40 percent of the school’s PA graduates go into primary care or family practice.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the demand for physician assistants to increase by 38 percent from 2012 to 2022, pushed upward by an aging population, a shortage of doctors and an increase in the number of insured people under the Affordable Care Act.
Not only is the high opportunity for employment luring people into the profession — PA students at the University of Detroit Mercy receive an average of five job offers before they graduate — but it’s also sweetened by the potential high wages: The median annual salary for physician assistants was $92,970 in 2013. That’s up from $86,410 in 2010, according to the BLS, and the figure climbs by about $2,000 every year.
Employment in thousands 2012: 86.7
Employment in thousands 2022: 120.0
Change by number: 33.3
Change by percentage: 38.4%
Job openings due to growth and replacement needs, 2012-22: 48.9
2012 median annual wage 2012: $90,930
This has not gone unnoticed by prospective students. When Eastern Michigan University launched its program, it received more than 600 applications for the 20 spots available.
That’s not unusual. The five other schools in Michigan all report receiving hundreds of applications every year for programs that have 40 or 50 openings. Grand Valley receives 350-450 applications for its program of 48 slots; Western Michigan University receives 700 for its 36 to 40 openings and has seen the number spike to as high as 1,200.
The number of PA programs nationally has jumped from about 80 to 187 in the past decade, said Jay Peterson, director of Eastern’s program, launched in May after the school spent $3.6 million on renovations to Rackham Hall, where the program is housed.
“Interest in the PA profession has exploded,” he said.
Some university programs have an “in” at particular health systems.
Beaumont Health System provides slots for clinical rotations with many schools, including Wayne State and Western Michigan, and always has openings for what it calls “midlevel providers,” a category that includes nurse practitioners as well as physician assistants, said Linda Kruso, director of workforce planning.
Beaumont has openings for 12 to 15 midlevel providers, a typical number at any given moment. An aging society pushes demand for physician assistants and nurse practitioners in two ways, Kruso said. Besides prompting more health care needs as people get older, it also leads to more doctors retiring.
This is creating a big need in primary care as more doctors wind down their practices while freshly minted doctors coming out of school gravitate toward better-paying specialty practices.
“Physician assistants and nurse practitioners are sometimes referred to as ‘physician extenders.’ They are a way of extending access to care through having teams,” Kruso said.
Eastern’s program brings Michigan’s PA program count to six. None of the other schools plans to increase their program size except for Grand Valley, which plans to add a 12-person program to its Traverse City regional center, with an expected opening in fall 2015. Although Grand Valley has increased the number of slots at its main program in Grand Rapids from 30 to 48 since 2007, it has no plans to further increase it.
“The great limiting factor for any PA program is the availability of clinical rotation sites,” Booth said.
That factor has kept Wayne State from increasing the number of students in its program, which is a perennial topic of discussion, said Stephanie Gilkey, who directed Wayne State’s PA program for 10 years until June. The school always is on the lookout for more hospitals and clinics to place students, but that’s just to keep pace with its current number of students.
“We’d love to increase enrollment. We probably could double it if we could prove we have enough clinical rotations,” Dereczyk said.
Eastern knew it was jumping into an already crowded pool when it opened its program this year. EMU plans to increase its PA program size to 30 students next year and to top it out at 40 the next year, to make sure it doesn’t end up with more students than places to send them for their second-year rotations.
The school also committed $1.1 million toward a new Advanced Medical Simulation Center (finished) and Human Anatomy Cadaver Laboratory (to be opened in May 2015) housed at the nearby St. Joseph Mercy Ann Arbor hospital. The lab and center are meant to give students an advantage when seeking rotations because they’ll have more experience with lifelike situations.
The Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant Inc. in Johns Creek, Ga., is the accrediting body for university PA programs. There are 64 schools in the country that have applied or indicated they plan to apply for accreditation. No Michigan schools are on the list.
But competition is probably going to increase eventually since the trends pushing demand for PAs show no sign of letting up. Dereczyk expects more Michigan schools to seek accreditation sooner or later.
“You always have rumors, but there’s nothing in the pipeline. The reality is that universities are going to apply for PA programs,” Dereczyk said.
She said Oakland University, which opened a medical school in 2011 and is affiliated with Beaumont, might see opportunity in such a program, and that it’s surprising University of Michigan, a school known for its medical program, doesn’t have one already.
“They have a nurse practitioner program. It’s curious they don’t have a physician assistant program,” Dereczyk said.
The lack of clinical training slots has limited UM’s focus to training advance practice nurses and physicians, according to a statement from UM media relations. OU said it does not have a PA program in the works right now but that it could be something the school looks into in the future.
“A feasibility study was done about adding a PA program and it indicated there was some concern over adequate clinical rotation space. Since then, developing a PA program has moved to the back burner,” said Brian Bierley, OU’s director of media relations, in a statement.
Dereczyk, who is on Eastern’s PA advisory board, said she’s not worried about the school’s new program worsening the clinical rotation situation in Michigan. Health systems tend to support local schools; Eastern has its place in Washtenaw County and UDM has its place in Wayne, she said.
What she finds more frustrating is the lack of funding for PA programs despite the increasing demand for them. Medical student programs get federal funding support that PA programs do not, she said.
“There’s demand for PAs and a projected physician shortage, yet there’s not a real big push to educate us or train us. We could get out of the pipeline quicker,” Dereczyk said.
Tony Miller, chief policy officer at the Physician Assistant Education Association, a lobbying organization on Alexandria, Va., said it’s a tricky situation. Health systems clearly want the PAs, as evidenced by the excess of job offers students receive. But they have a hard time making way for students because of the extra costs and also because medical students and others are all vying for slots, and they’re all coming at the health systems in increasing numbers, too.
The problem is new enough that PAEA is still looking into what exactly it thinks should be done to give students a hand. There is federal graduate medical education money that funds resident medical students. Conceivably, similar funding could support PA students, but given the budgetary mood in Washington these days, that’s unlikely.
“There’s no love in Congress to pay for any kind of education,” Miller said.
Washington also does not like the idea of giving more money directly to health systems when they already receive Medicare funding, he said. “By my discussions with some officials at the federal government, that’s not encouraged,” Miller said.
Some schools pay stipends to health systems to defray training costs. The PAEA doesn’t see that as a sustainable option, though, because it feeds into tuition increases and then higher health care costs — the very thing hiring a PA is supposed to help prevent.
There is a pot of money at U.S. Department of Health and Human Services designated for PA training that, although beset by cutbacks, could be used in a way that avoids a direct handout to health systems or cause tuition spikes: Give it to students willing to travel to faraway rural areas that have shortages of health care professionals. Students who can’t find sites in metro Detroit could head to the Upper Peninsula to do their work, their travel and lodging costs defrayed by the financial support.
“It helps to get more physician assistants to rural, underserved areas,” Miller said.
Central Michigan University
Number of open slots each year: 34
Usual number of applicants: 350-400
Year program was founded: 1998
Eastern Michigan University
Number of open slots each year: 20 (set to increase to 30 next year and 40 in 2016)
Usual number of applicants: 600
Year program was founded: 2014
Grand Valley State University
Number of open slots each year: 48
Usual number of applicants: 350-450
Year program was founded: 1995
University of Detroit Mercy
Number of open slots each year: 45
Usual number of applicants: 600-700
Year program was founded: 1972
Wayne State University
Number of open slots each year: 50
Usual number of applicants: 400-500
Year program was founded: 1996
Western Michigan University
Number of open slots each year: 36-40
Usual number of applicants: 700
Year program was founded: 1972
Source: Schools and Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant Inc.
When it comes to law, words matter, and their definitions matter even more.
The big problem with legal definitions surrounding driverless vehicle technology: There are none.
Tooling down Evergreen Road in Southfield these days brings thoughts on the finer points of car suspensions and whether the people who make them are careful about it.
But what if Southfield became more walkable?
Workers were expected to begin ripping up the street Monday, the first step in a $12 million plan to turn the stretch of Evergreen between 10 and 11 Mile roads into a pedestrian-friendly zone. It’s the beginning of a broader plan to transform part of what’s dubbed City Centre into a retail-heavy, downtown-like area.
City Centre is a triangular-shaped special assessment district bounded by Evergreen, Northwestern Highway and 11 Mile, with the municipal complex area on the east and the Lawrence Technological University campus on the south. It also contains the landmark Southfield Town Center.
By spring of next year, the one-mile stretch of Evergreen will have been winnowed down to four lanes from six and seven, have green medians running down the middle and be punctuated with traffic roundabouts at Civic Center Drive and at 11 Mile.
The median will add green space when Evergreen is closed off for events, while the roundabouts will guide traffic away from Evergreen. The sidewalks, now right at curbside, will be separated from the street by boulevards, while lighting, bus shelters and bike racks will be up-dated or added.
The plan already has one thing going for it: There’s already a big park, library and golf course on the east side of Evergreen, where the municipal complex is. A specially marked “crossing plaza” midblock will make it clear that pedestrians are expected to traverse from one side to the other.
The plan acknowledges the changed competitive landscape between cities and suburbs. As it’s become fashionable for companies to move to cities with identifiable downtowns, like Detroit, the sprawling office complexes of the suburbs have begun to look old-fashioned. The most striking piece of landscaping at 2000 Town Center is inside the glass walls of the tower’s lobby.
“This redevelopment project is a response to the changing demands of the business community today,” said Rochelle Freeman, the city’s business development manager.
But businesses are still attracted to the things that drew them to Southfield in the past, such as a central location and quick access to expressways, Freeman said.
“We want Detroit to be successful. We’re all in favor of that,” Freeman said. “We do know Detroit is attracting a lot of great new tenants, but the city of Southfield is also attracting a lot of great new tenants from Detroit. Detroit is not for everybody.”
Renderings of land a bit deeper into the area west of Evergreen show retail businesses overlooking wide, brick-paved pedestrian avenues filled with trees, art and bike racks.
The renderings, purely conceptual at this point, were drawn up by Lawrence Tech students looking at market research data from Gibbs Planning Group in Birmingham that said City Centre could support 645,000 square feet of retail space, Freeman said.
City Centre has drawn $120 million in development commitments since the start of fiscal 2014, according to numbers tallied by the city.
Lawrence Tech announced in February that the first phase — a three-story, 34,000-square-feet building — of its planned A. Alfred Taubman Engineering, Life Sciences and Architecture Complex will cost $15 million. The school estimates a total price tag of $55 million for the complex.
Last September, Stewart Thornhill took over as executive director of the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, housed at the University of Michigan‘s Stephen M. Ross School of Business. He replaced Tom Kinnear, who had led the institute since its founding in 1999.
Thornhill, a Canadian citizen, previously held the same title at the Pierre L. Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship at Western University‘s Ivey Business School in London, Ontario.
Now settled into his new role in a new country, Thornhill is working on a few new initiatives to further the institute’s entrepreneurial mission, including one to launch a Silicon Valley-style business accelerator. The accelerator would complement the institute’s TechArb incubator, managed in league with the Center for Entrepreneurship at UM’s College of Engineering.
The launch and early operation of the as-yet unnamed accelerator will be funded by a $1 million gift from the family of Bharat Desai, founder of Troy-based Syntel Inc. Thornhill filled in the early details of the plans in a conversation with Gary Anglebrandt.
Let’s hear more about the accelerator.
The accelerator will be modeled on Y Combinator, Techstars, Launchpad LA. The perfect company to enter an accelerator is the one that is quarter-baked. You want it to be half-baked before it’s really in a position to get that early, seed or angel investor money. But if companies try to go for that early investor too early, they’re going to fail or they’re going to have to give up so much of their company because of the wildly risky nature of it that it’s often not worth doing.
We often find that students who incubate ideas, whether in a formal incubator or just in their dorm room, often get to the point where they finish their degree, they’d love to be able to take it to that next stage, but they have to go get a job. They’ve got student loans, they have to pay rent, buy groceries.
So if we can fill in a gap where those companies have a place to go for another three or four months, we can put some funding behind them, put some intense mentorship behind them, put some very rigorous milestones in place to really keep them on track. And then when they graduate from that three- or four-month acceleration period, we put them in a position where they pitch to local VCs, local angels and student investment funds.
Y Combinator doesn’t charge an upfront cash fee for companies accepted into its program but, rather, takes a slice of equity. Are you going to do a similar thing?
We definitely want to have “you get money when you arrive.” Whether that’s going to be in the form of a convertible note, a forgivable loan if you achieve certain milestones, some equity play plus nondiluted capital — there’s a bunch of different models we’re playing with, some of which will be guided by what we can do as an entity of the university, some of which will be guided by what we can do as a function of the donor agreement and some of which will be guided by what makes sense for the companies coming in.
The differentiating factor between the accelerator and an incubator is the incubator is just space and mentorship. The accelerator will also have money higher expectations. And then there will be a graduation event, which will be a pitch day to the investment community. So we’ll bring in all the local VCs and angels; do a big, splashy event; have all the companies come in and pitch; and then set up opportunities where they can see if they can attract interest in their companies.
The timeline? We’d love to open in September. That’s a function of do we get into the space when we want, do we get the director hired, and can we get running?
Where’s the space expected to be?
We’re negotiating with a vendor downtown, close to campus. The incubator is off campus, between Washington and Liberty (streets), so we’d love to be in that same area.
Any idea as to the type of companies you expect to put in there?
The type will largely be determined by whether they can benefit from a three- or four-month acceleration period — let’s call it 15 weeks. There are certain companies that can make a lot of progress in 15 weeks. Those are the ones we’ll look at. Something like a therapeutic drug or a medical device where the development period is years or sometimes decades, they’re just not going to fit.
Likely what you’re going to see is lots of stuff around the “Internet of things” — software, hardware, interface devices, wearable computing, apps, some consumer devices — stuff where they can make a meaningful leap forward in that intense acceleration period.
Any other initiatives happening?
I’d like to bring more entrepreneur education outside of just what we do in our degree programs. I’ve developed, and I’m working to launch, a high-growth program for entrepreneurs — bring entrepreneurs into the university for a one-week program.
These are people who already have a business?
People who already have a business and are interested in taking it from a small business to a medium size or a medium size to a large company — really focus on growth.
I did a lot of this work on the Canadian side, and often what we find is people who run companies like this feel like they’re the only ones experiencing the problems and challenges they’re facing. They often lack a peer network; they don’t know where to go for support and education. They’re, quite frankly, so busy all the time fighting fires, they have very little time to reflect on longer-term strategy.
So there’s real value in giving them time and space to come in. We have world-class faculty here. The folks who teach in this building just continually amaze me with what they do and know.
When do you hope to start this here?
Ideally, I’d love to have the pilot of this program running by this time next year.
Portions of the lettering on the distinctive Highland Appliance sign along Woodward Avenue are missing, and the red words have faded to pink.
Memorable to many metro Detroiters from the store’s TV commercials, the Highland Park store closed its doors after the 1993 bankruptcy of Highland Superstores Inc. The sign still hangs, but in a way that does little to kindle nostalgia about the store, or Highland Park, the city.
A drive by the now-vacant site, at first glance, could cause assumptions about the state of things in Highland Park.
A publicly traded, Madison Heights-based company has set up a subsidiary just across the Canadian border to grow and sell 1.3 million pounds of marijuana a year.
Creative Edge Nutrition Inc., a nutritional supplement company that sells products for the likes of weight loss and energy boosting, formed CEN Biotech Inc. in Lakeshore, Ontario, just outside Windsor, to take advantage of the increasingly legal market for marijuana.
Canadian federal regulator Health Canada operates a system for providing medical marijuana to patients with prescriptions from doctors. CEN Biotech expects to receive approval to become a direct provider to patients through the system in April or May, said Creative Edge President and CEO Bill Chabaan. … Full article at crainsdetroit.com
— Crain’s Detroit Business, Jan. 12, 2014 (Copyright control)