Dan Gilbert was pushing something he’s urged before – more regional transportation other than the Q-Line through downtown Detroit – and he knows exactly where to look for help.
The federal government.
Gilbert, the founder and chairman of Rocket Companies, which includes Rocket Mortgage, the nation’s largest retail mortgage lender, made his case for federal help during an appearance at the Detroit Economic Club.
“Imagine if you have regional transportation going to the airport, back from the airport, east to west, north to south, it would completely change the region,” Gilbert said during his talk with DEC board chair Sandy Pierce. “The economic boom would be the biggest one we’ve ever seen in this area.”
The area formed a Regional Transit Authority in an effort to expand transportation. Such projects, Gilbert pointed out, are frequently funded by the federal government.
He said the RTA has been talking to the feds, to no avail.
“The RTA has been lobbying the federal government to really consider Detroit,” Gilbert said. “The problem is there’s been something like 21 other runs since 1900 that Detroit has made attempts to get a regional system that have failed. So (the government doesn’t) really believe in us.
“So we really have to get more and more community groups together, more and more business groups to really help the RTA make the pitch to the feds and figure out other funding sources, as well,” he added.
Gilbert pointed out ridership on the QLine, which runs along Woodward, shows how much people in the area want access to more mass transit.
“People get on that and ride it all through downtown,” he said. “And this year, I think it’s 1,300,000 users, riders will be on that thing. The first couple of years, I was really skeptical because I would look inside as I was driving and it would be empty. That’s just a three-and-a-half-mile strip.”
Having more transportation available would put Detroit on a par with cities like Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle and others, according to Gilbert, and would help with one of the area’s biggest business concerns: Attracting and retaining talent.
According to Gilbert, too many students study at schools like the University of Michigan, Michigan State and Wayne State, then leave for jobs in other cities,
“It’s absolutely absurd that … 80 percent of them leave to go somewhere else,” he said. “(That’s) a lot of taxpayer dollars, certainly a lot of mom-and-dad dollars, invested in their children (going to) cities like Chicago, New York, Boston or Los Angeles.
“We’ve got to keep them here,” he added. “And these are the kids that start companies that have great skills that they can help grow other companies. I mean, it’s all about talent and talent retention and recruiting. And we survey our young folks almost every month and they tell us what they want and what they need in a new city. And certainly transportation’s a big one.”
Gilbert should know about talent acquisition and retention. He moved his businesses to Detroit’s urban core in 2010, and his investment in the revitalization of downtown led to the creation of Bedrock.
Since its founding in 2011, Bedrock and its affiliates have invested and committed more than $7.5 billion to acquire, develop and operate more than 140 properties in Detroit and Cleveland, where Gilbert is the majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA.
Gilbert is a fourth generation Detroiter and a graduate of Michigan State University who also got his Juris Doctor from Wayne State University.
He’s been studying and noticing the business climate of the city since he was a kid, when his father and grandfather both had small businesses in Detroit and the young Dan would “would always take me and I would just look around and see things and they’d point out things and they love the city, and you always hear great things about the city from them.”
Gilbert said he witnessed the city’s decline over the decades and felt a sense of embarrassment when he’d tell people he was from Detroit and they would ask, “Oh, are you OK?”
Determined to change that mindset, Gilbert set about moving his businesses downtown, knowing he could fill some of the empty buildings and hoping other businesses would see that success and want to emulate it.
“That was the personal reason; the business reason is that even back 10 to 15 years ago, and certainly now, these young folks coming out of college don’t want to be in suburbs … they want to be in urban cores,” he said. “So we said, let’s go downtown and try to remake it so we can recruit some of this great talent across the country.”
People used to tell him that Detroit “wanted to be the new Chicago.” Gilbert disputed that.
“I said, ‘no, we want to be the new Detroit,’” he said. “I think every city’s got its different culture, different bones. I just think Detroit’s got grit. It’s people who’ve been through so much, they really want to make a difference now and change it. It’s really always all about the people.”
