Sven Gustafson - Daily Detroit (Page 16)

A Look In The Mirror: 5 Smart People On Detroit’s Amazon HQ2 Disappointment

Detroit’s failure to make the list of 20 finalists for Amazon’s $5 billion HQ2 project and its 50,000 jobs has been the talk of the town. Especially after the all-hands-on-deck effort to produce a joint Detroit-Windsor bid that had many people believing the Motor City, once considered strictly a longshot, had a serious chance. In our latest episode, we talk to five local experts from a variety of backgrounds for their perspectives on what the failure says about our region and where we go fr...

Survey In Royal Oak Will Gauge Interest In City-Operated Buses

Royal Oak plans to survey residents and organizations to gauge interest in funding a city-operated transit system to connect residents who aren’t served by SMART buses to downtown and other attractions. Proponents also hope such a system would ease chronic parking shortages. Talks are in an early stage to design a system that would complement but not eliminate SMART, the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation that operates buses outside of the city. A seven-member transit ta...

New Ferndale Radio Station Hits The Airwaves From Inside The Rust Belt Market

If you’ve been surfing the airwaves (remember those?) around downtown Ferndale lately, you may have noticed a new non-commercial college-style radio station operating at the FM frequency 100.7. It’s Ferndale Radio, WFCB, short for Ferndale Community Broadcasting, with a signal that goes about 3 or 4 miles. It’s the same folks who launched a crowdfunding effort back in 2016 to launch a low-power FM station under a rare, special construction permit they’d obtained from the Federal Communications...

Semi-Protected Bike lanes Appear On Pinecrest In Ferndale, Oak Park To Get "Road Diet"

The repaving of Pinecrest, which closed the north-south connector street between Nine Mile Road and Pleasant Ridge for most of the summer, has brought an additional benefit besides smoother pavement: semi-protected bike lanes. The bike lanes run curbside on both sides of the street between Nine Mile and West Oakridge Street. They’re separated from traffic lanes by double lines painted on the pavement, with cluster of three posts near every intersection. They add to a growing network of bike...

Changing NeighborhoodsDetroit Development

Allow Me To Freak Out About $400K Homes In My Old Detroit Neighborhood

I last spent time in Woodbridge Farms, my old neighborhood, last fall, when I joined some coworkers to plant trees with crews from the Greening of Detroit. And I wrote about what I saw and how it illustrated the dramatic and jarring ways that Detroit is changing. But nothing quite prepared me for this. A developer team is working with the city to invest around $6 million to build up to 27 houses in the historic neighborhood, which began in the early 1870s. All good. But here’s the kicker, vi...

Campus MartiusDowntown Detroit Skyscrapers

Plans For Monroe Block Suggest Density, Modernism Coming To Detroit

There’s big downtown Detroit development news — and to no one’s surprise, Dan Gilbert is involved — as Bedrock Detroit plans an $800 million new mixed-use development anchored by a 35-story tower overlooking Campus Martius. So far as I can tell from the renderings, plans for the Monroe Block project call for building two towers and other buildings on two irregularly shaped blocks bordered by Monroe Avenue, Bates and Randolph streets, and Cadillac Square. The blocks today are mostly either su...

New Protected Bike Lanes Taking Shape on Cass Avenue

If you’ve been on Cass Avenue lately, you might’ve seen some kiosks being installed along the sidewalks in a few places. Or the smooth new blacktop road surface. They’re part of larger plans to bring protected bike lanes to the street, from West Grand Boulevard in the New Center all the way to Lafayette near the riverfront downtown. Two kiosks have been installed — one in front of Old Main, on the Wayne State campus, and the other near the Rosa Parks Transit Center downtown. “It’s gon...

Downtown DetroitNorth end QLINE

New Report Shows QLINE Service Improvements, Ridership On The Rise

A new report from the parent organization of Detroit’s streetcar says that the new QLINE streetcar service is making improvements following several opening glitches, expected growing pains and complaints from riders. M-1 Rail, the QLINE’s operating organization, has been working with the streetcar’s operator, Transdev North America, on service improvements for about a month now. Those have resulted in more riders, shorter waits and better coordination with traffic signals. Ridership on the Q...

DetroitDevelopment downtown detroit partnership

PODCAST: What's Next For Downtown Detroit? We Talk With Eric Larson Of The DDP

[smart_track_player url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/dailydetroithappyhour/DD-22-Happy_hour_Larson_mixdown.mp3″ image=”/content/images/wordpress/2017/07/eric-larson-daily-detroit.jpg” social_gplus=”false” social_linkedin=”true” social_email=”true” twitter_username=”TheDailyDetroit” ] Downtown Detroit continues its remarkable transformation, with more and more foot traffic, construction sites sprouting like weeds and new businesses opening up on the reg. On this episode of the Daily Detroit Hap...

DetroitPedestrian Plaza walkability

Car-Free Pedestrian Plazas Are Suddenly All The Rage In The Motor City

Detroit, for decades a monument to the hegemony of the automobile, is increasingly ceding road real estate to pedestrian uses, most recently through the creation of outdoor public plazas. Since spring, at least three pedestrian plazas have opened around town: the Gratiot-Randolph public plaza, a new plaza on Woodward between Jefferson and Larned, and now a pop-up pedestrian plaza in suburban Oak Park along Nine Mile Road. Curbed Detroit, in a story about the new Woodward Avenue plaza, puts t...

FaygoMichigan Booze Michigan Mixed Drinks

Live It Up This Summer With These 8 Mixed Drinks With A Michigan Theme

Recently, your crack Daily Detroit crew gathered together to unwind for a little house party. As the night wore on and the drinks flowed, the talk turned, as it does, from blogging strategy to cocktail recipes with a Michigan or Detroit theme. I instantly thought of the “Nuge,” a perfectly trashy drank named after — and fully befitting the legacy of — Detroit’s own Ted Nugent. A friend of mine named Marc McFinn, the former singer of Ann Arbor punk band Mazinga, served it to me in a plastic cup...

8 mileMural Street Art

New Mural On 8 Mile To Be Created By Detroit Artist Ndubisi Okoye

The Eight Mile Boulevard Association has chosen the artist whose winning design will become a mural on the wall of a vacant building near Livernois to kick off its Art on 8 program. Ndubisi Okoye is a Detroit-based artist and illustrator who has done murals in Detroit for Our/Detroit Vodka building and a design-install project for the General Motors International Singapore Office Project. His work has appeared on HGTV. The project is funded by a $5,800 grant from Mercedes Benz Financial Serv...

Bike share tipsDetroit Detroit Bike Share

Detroit’s New Bike Share Opened Today. Is MoGo For You?

Daily Detroit stopped by the New Center today for the launch of the new MoGo Detroit bike sharing system. It opens with 43 bikes and 430 stations spread across a wide swath of the city, from Clark Park in southwest Detroit, to the New Center, out to West Village on the east side. One of us got to ride a MoGo bike back to one of the downtown stations. The three-speed bikes are sturdy, built to take a beating and have a remarkably smooth ride. Seeing as how Detroiters are still trying to wrap...

Ferndale-Run 'Fab Cab' Trolley Would Link Avenue of Fashion With Detroit Zoo, Royal Oak

Voters may have deflated hopes for more robust public transit when it defeated the Regional Transit Authority proposal last fall, but that doesn’t mean backers have given up. Ferndale is pushing a plan to launch free weekend shuttle service linking neighborhoods and shopping districts in Detroit, Ferndale, Pleasant Ridge and Royal Oak with the Detroit Zoo. Ferndale has dubbed the trolley service the “Fab Cab.” Officials envision the four cities and publicly supported zoo each chipping in to su...

Last Two Viaduct Art Projects Are Near Completion In Detroit's New Center

The final two underpass art projects are finally installed and operational along the railroad viaduct along Second and Third avenues in Detroit. But no, they’re not finished. Meanwhile “Reflector,” the project completed way back in 2015 in the viaduct at Cass Avenue, needs repairs because of vandalism and several truck crashes. One other twist: The original plan for the Second Avenue viaduct, a project called “Resonance” by a three-person team calling itself R+D Lab, was scrapped due to compli...

FerndaleFront Porch Music Festival Music Festival

"Front Porch" Outdoor Music Festival May Be Coming To Ferndale This June

Ferndale could play host to a new outdoor music festival that would involve bands playing acoustic sets on residents’ front porches in June after the City Council approved a special event permit earlier this month. “The Front Porch” is the brainchild of Michael Benghiat, a marketing professional at Front Porch Productions in Southfield, who said he envisions it as part of a public television series. It would take place Saturday, June 24. “This event is really serving as a showpiece and the l...

1980 Promo Video: ‘Where will you be the picture of success? Where else but Detroit!’

Promotional videos aim to capture their subject in the best light, but it’s hard to feel that way in hindsight about this attempt to market Detroit to convention planners in 1980. Complete with cheesy period music, the film, which was recently converted by the Detroit Historical Society to digital format, portrays the usual list of attractions — though heavy on those in the suburbs. The 80s were a time when attention drifted from city downtowns and toward indoor shopping malls. So outside of...

Eastern MarketNorth end Southwest Detroit

The new Detroit Bike Share launches in April. Here’s how it’s shaping up

Detroit’s bike share system is on track to launch in April under a yet-to-be-determined name, with various membership and payment options, subsidies for low-income users, a mobile app and solar-powered stations that can easily be relocated based on demand. The first phase of the launch will spread 420 bikes between 42 solar-powered stations, with 100,000 trips forecast during the first year, according to Lisa Nuszkowski, executive director of Detroit Bike Share with the Downtown Detroit Partne...