Renaissance

Woodbridge 'Won't Be the Same' with $400,000 Homes, an Ex-Resident Laments

September 23, 2017, 3:38 PM by  Alan Stamm

"Nothing quite prepared me for this," Sven Gustafson writes about pricey homes coming to the Woodbridge area of Midtown Detroit -- "my old neighborhood."

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Sven Gustafson: "Won't be the same."

At his 8-Wood Blog, the freelance writer, podcast host and former corporate communicator acknowledges: "The neighborhood has seen a lot of changes since I left, many of them good." But he's unsettled by a recent Crain's Detroit Business preview of plans for up to 27 houses in a $6-million venture by Procida Diggs Development Group, which also is behind a Midtown West project.  

The three-bedroom residences are likely to cost $350,000 to $400,000 range, builder Douglass Diggs tells Kurt Nagl of Crain's. 

"This is frankly astounding," reacts Gustafson under this headline: "Allow me to freak out about $400K homes in my old Detroit neighborhood."

I'm thinking about what it does to the neighborhood as a whole. . . .

I lived in Woodbridge Farms from 2002 to 2005, during the Kwame Kilpatrick era. There were flickers of revitalization sprinkled around pockets of the city, but nothing like what we’re seeing now.

Woodbridge Farms (I didn’t know anyone who referred to it that way; we mostly just called it Woodbridge) was populated by eccentrics — reclusive Cass Corridor artists and hippies, gay couples living in perennial fixer-uppers, an anarchist collective that hosted performance art and punk bands, business owners and low-income folks who lived in apartment buildings or old homes subdivided into apartments. . . .

Yes, it was sparsely populated, with plenty of vacant lots. There was crime, and it occasionally got bad, but people looked out for each other.

It was decidedly not upscale back then, and I loved it. I loved the weirdness and the characters, the sense of possibility. The old houses and the community feel.

I could wander down the block, gather wood dumped on a vacant lot and burn it in our backyard chiminea fireplace. The people down the street had a pet peacock and hosted giant Academy Awards night celebrations each year. I grew enormous sunflowers and vegetables.

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Architectural concept of three-bedroom homes coming to Woodbridge. 

Gustafson, a 1993 University of Michigan graduate and former MLive journalist (2007-09), figures the "perfectly nice" homes coming to the corner of Lincoln and Selden and between Selden and Brainard off Trumbull will "certainly help boost property values."

But at that price point, they’ll frankly usher in a different class of people to what has been a relatively stable but still rough-around-the-edges neighborhood. . . .

It won’t be the same. 


Read more:  8-Wood Blog


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