Harvard Business School Alumni: "Detroit suddenly looks like a Good Investment."
Detroit—on the other side of the country’s largest municipal bankruptcy—suddenly looks like a good investment.
A trip through downtown Detroit with Peter Cummings is part urban planning seminar, part zoning board meeting, and part family history. As the 68-year-old real estate developer navigates the central business district, he sketches an idiosyncratic map of the city—almost three decades of knowledge of what each piece of property used to be, what it could have been, what it is now, and what it might become—laid out along an opinionated time line of Detroit’s highs and lows. And there have been a lot of lows.
Just a few years ago, Cummings was done with Detroit. The municipal government was in disarray, the auto industry was collapsing, the population was plummeting, and business opportunities had vanished. Now he’s back, making big real estate bets that could shape the city’s future. He’s all in on Detroit.