In the News

Loving Detroit by the inch; welcome to the microhood

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Detroit

The people at Xconomy take a close look at Detroit's Loveland project and the ties its founders have to San Francisco's Silicon Valley entrepreneurial ecosystem. It's one of the more revealing pieces on this well-known story, even if it does call Detroit's most photographed ruin the "Michigan Central Railroad station."

Excerpt:

It would be easy to dismiss Jerry Paffendorf and his friends as a bunch of art-nerd carpetbaggers from San Francisco who see Detroit as the latest canvas for their airy-fairy ideas about virtual communities and social entrepreneurship.

In fact, that's how some locals reacted when reports surfaced in The Detroit News last year that Paffendorf had bought an abandoned lot on the city's east side for $500, renamed it Plymouth, and announced plans to resell it, one square inch at a time, on the Internet. "People brought up stuff like, 'Who does this hipster f*ggot think he is, moving in from San Francisco with stupid Internet ideas,' or 'It's illegal to represent that you are offering land for sale if it's not real,'" Paffendorf says. "And there was some skepticism that I would want to stay in the city."

Read the rest of the story here.

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In the News

Loving Detroit by the inch; welcome to the microhood

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