How JPMorgan Chase Is Fueling Detroit’s Revival
There are two kinds of storefronts on this stretch of Detroit’s West McNichols Road: Boarded-up and “Why isn’t this boarded up?” Most of the one- and two-story buildings are clad in drab painted plywood or the gunmetal gray of security shutters. At 10:30 on a Thursday morning, the liquor store on the corner of San Juan is the only business with noticeable traffic—unless you count the one being run out of the Honda coupe idling at a bus stop. The driver is conducting a cash-for-something-in-a-sandwich-bag transaction with a passerby, both of them oblivious to the horn blasts from the westbound Number 30 whose space they occupy.
It’s a tableau that epitomizes what people who don’t live in Detroit imagine when they think about Detroit. It’s the picture you might conjure when you read that the city’s population has shrunk by 60% since World War II, or when you see 50th-anniversary remembrances of the riots of 1967. It’s an almost-perfect image of Rust Belt stagnation; the only detail missing from the stereotype is that none of the shuttered stores is actually on fire....