12 minute read
COMPENDIUM
COMPENDIUM: HOW OUTSIDERS VIEW DETROIT
A RARE GEM IN A CITY THAT HAS STRUGGLED
THE NEW YORK TIMES OCT. 20, 2022 BY JOSEPH B. TREASTER The Detroit Institute of Arts — now heralding its long relationship with Vincent van Gogh — is one of the finest museums in America and a sanctuary in a city that has gone through moments of glorious wealth — think Henry Ford — and decades of rough times.
The sprawling museum has a Diego Rivera masterpiece mural; lots of powerful African American art; a Rembrandt; a Michelangelo; a rare Pieter Bruegel; an expansive collection of African sculptures, textiles and masks; and one of the first and biggest American collections of the bold, strident German Expressionists that enraged Hitler.
The Diego Rivera mural is the jewel. “It’s our Sistine Chapel,” said Salvador Salort-Pons, the director and chief executive of the museum. “Everybody goes to the Sistine Chapel when they’re in Rome. When they’re in Detroit, they come to see our Diego Rivera.”
The museum has a huge collection of American art going back to colonial days, and lots of modern European paintings and sculptures. It has several Warhols, and works by some of the giants of Abstract Expressionism — de Kooning, Rothko, Frankenthaler and Motherwell. And it has mummies, ancient Chinese porcelain, centuries-old Greek statuary and shining body armor from Germany and Italy. ...
Couples come to the museum for dates. On Saturdays, convoys of limousines pull up with brides and grooms to pose for wedding pictures against the museum’s delicately streaked marble walls and Beaux-Arts lanterns.
“I’ve been coming here since I was a kid,” said Laura Hureski, stretching out on a bench on the museum lawn in her flowing wedding gown one afternoon in August. “It’s so beautiful.” ...
MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION DRIVES HUGE DIP IN DETROIT DRUG RAIDS
THE CENTER SQUARE OCT. 25, 2022 BY BRETT ROWLAND AND TOM GANTERT Drug raids in Detroit have fallen 95 percent since a peak in 2012, largely as a result of voters’ decision to legalize recreational marijuana and shifting other police priorities.
Detroit police conducted 3,462 drug raids in fiscal year 2012. Nearly every year since then, that number has declined. Last year, police conducted 186 drug raids, according to the city’s annual financial report.
The 95 percent decline in drug raids in the city is the result of a combination of factors, Detroit police officials said. One clear factor: Voters approved a 2018 ballot measure to legalize recreational use and possession of marijuana for those 21 and older and imposed a tax on marijuana sales. The measure passed with 56 percent of voters supporting it.
Detroit Police Assistant Chief Charles Fitzgerald said a significant number of the department’s drug raids used to involve marijuana.
“Marijuana raids used to make up a large percentage of our drug enforcement activities,” he said. “With the legalization of marijuana, there has been a significant drop in those types of raids.”
But that’s not the only factor. The decline in drug raids began well before voters passed Proposition 1 in 2018 and recreational sales began in December 2019.
Fitzgerald said the way illegal drugs are sold also has changed.
“The very nature of drug sales has changed a great deal in recent years,” he said. “The neighborhood drug house is much less of an issue than it used to be. Dealers, to a much larger extent, are no longer fresh take on the Bolt, the Bolt EUV, a larger crossover with Super Cruise hands-off driver assist technology. …
“EVs are about Mary [Barra] having a story for Wall Street to say how they are going to compete with Tesla (and Ford) and to reach a new market for them which is the coastal buyers who prefer Toyota and BMW to Chevy and Cadillac,” Loren McDonald, CEO of EVAdoption, an EV/EV charging consulting and analyst firm told Newsweek.
“The Bolt is, in essence, their Toyota Prius; the GMC Hummer EV was a prototype beast of a $100,000 vehicle to learn from when building the Silverado EV. The Lyriq is an exciting opportunity to reinvigorate the Cadillac brand (GM executives have told me reviving the Cadillac brand via electrification is a once-in-a-career opportunity); the Celestiq is a halo car that will sell maybe a few thousand over several years and is just a form of advertising to help excite people about the brand,” McDonald said.
The first two brought to market after the Bolt EV and Bolt EUV were the GMC Hummer EV and the Cadillac Lyriq EV. Since then, the market has seen the introduction of the Chevrolet Blazer and Equinox EVs, Chevy Silverado EV, GMC Sierra 1500 EV, Cadillac Celestiq and the two BrightDrop vans, which GM is including in its 20-vehicle total.
A representative from GM told Newsweek that their definition of launch means introduce, not put on sale. …
selling from fixed locations, such as a vacant house. Instead, they are setting up individual meetings at various locations with their customers. That makes them harder to track, but it also creates less of a neighborhood nuisance if there is not a stream of activity at one location.”
Fitzgerald said the department is focused on what residents are concerned about in their neighborhoods. …
GM’S MARY BARRA MADE BIG PROMISES, AND SHE’S STARTING TO DELIVER
NEWSWEEK • NOV. 14, 2022 • BY JAKE LINGEMAN General Motors has come a long way since 2009 when the United States government provided the financing for its Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Today, the company’s focus is on developing and implementing its battery electric vehicle (BEV) architecture, the Ultium EV Platform, which underpins some of its newest electric vehicles (EVs) in the passenger and commercial vehicle space.
In 2021, GM sold less than 25,000 electric vehicles in the United States, most of them either the Bolt EV or the Bolt EUV. It moved one GMC Hummer and its BrightDrop commercial van was still in the reservation phase. Cadillac Lyriq orders were open, but deliveries had yet to be made.
CEO Mary Barra has shown confidence in GM’s ability to gain electric vehicle market share with billions in investments, despite having only those three consumer EVs currently on sale. Several additional models have been announced and revealed for the coming years.
Barra took the helm at GM in January of 2014, the first woman to hold the highest office at a global automaker. Soon after, the roadmap and promises on electric vehicles started coming fast and furious. The next year Chevrolet introduced the Bolt EV, a crossover designed to compete with the Tesla Model Y but cost less.
GM promised in 2017 that it would introduce two new vehicles based on the learnings from the Bolt EV, and that they would be the first of “at least 20 new all-electric vehicles that will launch by 2023.” Out of that came a
WHAT DRIVES THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN’S ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESS
FORBES • OCT. 11, 2022 • BY PETE WILKINS In preparation of speaking at the Michigan Tech Week (MTW) on Oct. 12 and 13, I discovered so many connections to the University of Michigan (U-M) that I decided to dig into what powers U-M’s entrepreneurial success.
Seemingly everyone knows that the University of Michigan is the world’s leading public research institution. What’s not as widely known is how Ann Arbor has a storied and growing entrepreneurship ecosystem that shows no signs of slowing down. From the pioneering machine vision, medical device, and digital manufacturing startups of the 1980s and 1990s to the groundbreaking pharmaceutical and medical device spinouts of the 2000s, and the cybersecurity leadership of the 2000s and 2010s into current-day, Ann Arbor and the broader U-M-affiliated entrepreneurial ecosystem continues to make a positive impact on the world.
While the University of Michigan has been formally educating students on entrepreneurship for decades, the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has notably ramped up in the last 10 years and has effectively used its powerful alumni network to amplify its growth. I found that the university has more than 15 programs and centers in entrepreneurship and exceeds 30 entrepreneurial student organizations.
The most notable activity is emerging from the College of Engineering, Ross School of Business, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts — respectively the homes of the Center of Entrepreneurship, the Zell Lurie Institute, and optiMize. The U-M’s Center for Entrepreneurship (CFE) is one of the key engines driving that growth. The CFE is a unit of the College of Engineering and the Center has helped more than 30,000 researchers and students since 2008.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of U-M’s entrepreneurship ecosystem is its large and engaged alumni network. With more than 500,000 members, ambitious students and researchers can always count on an alum (if not several) to work at the forefront of any given industry. Like many of the programs at the university, the CFE connects more than 3,000 students to this dynamic audience and grants its next-gen leaders the ability to learn directly from remotely based founders. ...
When CFE was founded by famed NASA administrator and former U-M professor Thomas Zurbuchan in 2008, its aim was to evangelize entrepreneurship in Ann Arbor and to help instill the entrepreneurial mindset into the regional culture.
In the mid-2010s, that focus began to evolve. Alums Dug Song and Jon Oberheide were on the verge of having their Ann Arbor-based cybersecurity startup acquired. Just as the $2.4B acquisition of Duo Security gave Ann Arbor its first modern unicorn…
SKYBRIDGE MICHIGAN, WORLD’S LONGEST TIMBER-TOWERED SUSPENSION BRIDGE, IS NOW OPEN
TODAY.COM OCT. 25, 2022 BY ARIANA BROCKINGTON Daredevil tourists in Michigan can now walk across the world’s longest timber-towered suspension bridge.
The attraction, located at Michigan’s Boyne Mountain Resort, connects the peaks of McLouth and Disciples Ridge.
According to the resort, thousands of guests visited the pedestrian bridge for its opening on Oct. 15.
“Standing at approximately 1,200 feet long, bridge visitors experience a thrilling adventure with panoramic views of Boyne Valley and this season’s picturesque fall foliage,” the resort said in a press release.
Guests who travel to SkyBridge Michigan can take in the beautiful scenery while riding a chairlift to the top of the mountain. Then, they can experience the open-air walk across the 5-foot-wide attraction, which hangs 118 feet above Boyne Valley, the press release said.
Those who aren’t afraid of heights can enjoy a clear view of the fall leaves below them at the center of the bridge, which features a 36-foot glass floor.
Visitors can stroll along SkyBridge Michigan from 10 a.m. until dusk daily, through Oct. 31. The bridge will be open from Friday through Sunday starting on Nov. 4 until Dec. 4. Daily openings will resume on Dec. 9 and last through the winter season until Jan. 7.
Tickets are valid the day of purchase. They are $25 for adults, $20 for seniors 70 and older and $15 for children who are 3-10 years old. Children 2 and under receive free entry.
The bridge is the latest addition to the Boyne Mountain Resort, which has been open since 1948.
“If either lightning or thunder is present within a 15-mile radius of the site, SkyBridge Michigan must not operate or must be evacuated,” the website said. “SkyBridge Michigan is able to operate during precipitation as long as visibility is adequate and walking surfaces are clear.” …
SYMPATHY FOR DEALERS
CAR & DRIVER • NOVEMBER 2022• BY JAMIE KITMAN There’s a reason retired athletes, family trusts, and private equity like to park big chunks of cash in automotive dealerships. And it isn’t necessarily that they like cars. In the United States, the sale of automobiles annually accounts for close to a trillion dollars in economic activity, and it turns out that situating yourself somewhere near the receiving end of all of that money changing hands is a pretty good place to be. Lately, it’s been better than ever. …
Pandemic-Powered Profits
Against all odds, the COVID-19 pandemic made for some extraordinarily fat times for carmakers and car dealers alike. After some grim months — sales fell off the table in April 2020 to an annualized rate of 8.8 million units, marking an almost 50 percent year-over-year decline — volume came quickly roaring back, as people realized they’d rather drive around in their own private automobile than ride the bus next to some dude with the sniffles. And even if shortages of chips and other components meant sales didn’t come all the way back, profits certainly did, with many carmakers.
Pump Up the Volume
Many dealers fear that manufacturers, whose business model historically wants them operating factories at maximum potential, will eventually solve their supply-chain issues. And when they do, the industry’s overcapacity will flood the market anew with vehicles, leading once again to excess inventory.
Cut Out the Middlemen?
This brings us to another series of dealer worries. If people who can afford new cars are able to pay more and continue to exhibit the willingness to wait substantial amounts of time for delivery, perhaps OEMs might be tempted to adopt the direct-to-consumer sales model Tesla uses. The EV giant’s high sales prices, glacial delivery times, tech-bro share price, and eye-popping market capitalization are the stuff of envy for smokestack industrialists from Detroit to Stuttgart to Tokyo and back. …
01-02.23
THE TICKER
24
HIGH LIFE
CASS Sheetmetal in Detroit has become an expert in historic renovation projects, including restoration work at the Book Tower in Detroit. The company, which got its start in 1990, today has 38 employees.
