Robert Slattery in front of Venn Manor

Slattery's dream

Meet one of the visionaries transforming the Cass Corridor.

by Jim Dulzo
4/12/00

"If you are negative, you are like a magnet."

Inside Venn Manor

"I think sometimes I just wear people out with my tenacity."

On this bright March morning in midtown Detroit, the lions have again routed the lambs. A cold north wind blows straight down Cass Avenue; knapsacked college kids and brown-bagging winos clutch their coats and lean into it, teeth chattering.

Inside the Midtown Development Group office just south of Willis, the scene is far cozier but only slightly less frenetic. Bob Slattery, 43, Midtown’s founder, sometime-receptionist and staff visionary, spins around from the phone to greet another visitor. He looks up from his wheelchair with tired, calm eyes set in a rounded, unlined, soft face. Outside, an errant car alarm pulses like a migraine.

It’s only 10 a.m., but it’s already been a tough day. A bank has again delayed a long-promised, critical loan because of still more catch-22s.

It’s been tough like that for many of the past 19 years. Ever since 1981, when he and his wife Debbie bought a broken-down house around the corner on West Willis and started restoring it, Slattery has been trying to bring middle-class people back to the Cass Corridor not just to gawk, but to live. Now, after daring the laws of economic gravity for so long, Slattery is finally seeing real results.

"About three or four years ago, I thought I was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel," he says quietly. "This is really an exciting time."

Midtown now has three apartment buildings and a six-unit condo up and running, all brought back from the dead by Slattery’s amazing persistence. And he is no longer alone. Along Cass and Woodward, from just south of Wayne State University to the Fisher expressway, other developers are now hard at work too. One is transforming a seedy hotel into upscale apartments; another is rehabbing a rundown drug dealers’ hovel into affordable student housing. The Detroit Symphony and the Board of Education have broken ground on a performing-arts high school even as the orchestra finalizes plans for an adjacent, smaller performance space. The brand-new Gandhi McMahon Apartments are open. There’s a bustling bakery, Avalon International Breads, selling whole-grain breads and designer coffees.

It wasn’t always this way. When he and Debbie moved in, the hood had hit bottom. Half of its population had left; median household income had plummeted to $5,000; the once-stylish collection of early-century architecture had become a mad, forbidding jumble of weed-choked, shit-soaked, blown-out buildings. Church rescue missions and government agencies offered slight succor to the junkies, whores, homeless and handicapped left behind by an unprecedented, post-riot, mass exodus.

"I was completing my studies at Wayne," Slattery recalls of those bad old days, "and Ronald Reagan cut off my school funding. I had to get a part-time job in medical sales. I figured I could go to school at night."

And, in his supposedly spare time, get into urban rehab. Smitten by incredibly cheap prices on the area’s once-beautiful buildings, undaunted by stagflation’s 18.5 percent interest rates, Slattery found a low-interest city loan and bought two more buildings adjacent to his house. With no remodeling experience and unable to walk, but aided by his wife and several brothers, he went to work on the gaping holes, bad plumbing and shorted-out wiring now called home. He stopped going to school.

"I got flat tires all the time," he says of those early days of wheeling around a house full of junk. "It happened very slowly, but I kept going because I had these other properties I had to work on, too. And I just developed this vision about it. But it hasn’t been the most pleasant experience."

Slattery’s ceaseless phone calls, letters, applications, meetings and cajoling steadily picked away at an impossible situation. He worked on the city bureaucracy, the property tax code, the takings and title laws, the feds, the banks, the foundations, the zoning boards, the utilities, the builders, the suppliers – anyone who could help, or at least not hinder, him.

"I think sometimes I just wear people out with my tenacity," he says. "They know that if they don’t help me now, I will still be out there two months from now, asking questions. I try not to be so offensive that they will start to hate me. How do you move people without doing that? I try to take the path of least resistance."

For 14 years, the path was achingly slow. He plowed the money from his medical sales business into his house and then into the Milton, a semi-abandoned, smelly, gray wreck of a flophouse across the street. It was 1986 by the time anyone would invest in purchasing the Stuber-Stone, once a large, attractive auto garage. The once-glorious Venn Manor languished for 17 years before he found the money to fix it.

His gallons of sweat equity failed to inspire much investor confidence: Between 1981 and 1995 Slattery was only able to spend $140,000 on rehabbing his four properties. He can’t explain where he found the hope to keep going and shrugs off theories about his physical problems forging an unstoppable fortitude. He thinks he was just born that way.

"My friends were more depressed about it than I was," he says of the accident that put him in his wheelchair when he was 16. A car ran him and his bicycle off the road on Detroit’s east side and he flew into an elm tree, "just like you’d see in a cartoon." The hospital "flubbed" his case, leaving him in bed for three crucial months when he should have been in physical therapy. By the time he got out, it was clear he would never walk again. But he graduated from high school, enrolled at Wayne State, and married Debbie.

"She’s been tremendously supportive over the years," he says. "She is still frightened by our situation, though, because I still haven’t made any money and I haven’t made our family’s life any easier.

"What if I had chosen to live in a rehab center?" he asks. "I know people that just stay home all day; they watch TV and collect their checks and that is their life. I just couldn’t imagine that. Or working the corporate life. So now the question is how is the future going to play out? I get so frustrated with working seven days a week with very little return."

Slattery wheels back to his desk for a conference call with two state officials. He wants Clean Michigan Initiative money to remove the underground gasoline tanks beneath an abandoned gas station down the street. If the tanks were leaking, he could get the money. But they’re not; the long conversation eventually reveals that he’d just have to pay the state back anyway. He politely hangs up, allows himself a wry smile and says he’ll just pay for it himself, if that bank loan ever comes through.

Slattery’s luck started to turn, and his smiles became less rueful, soon after Bill Clinton chased the Republicans out of the White House and Dennis Archer chased some of the hostile, do-nothing indifference out of City Hall. By 1995, Slattery found himself sitting in the middle of a brand-new federal Empowerment Zone. Then came a neighborhood Empowerment Zone, a state-based program administered by the city. Now tax abatements, salable tax credits and low-interest loans were available. With the local economy improving, Slattery’s company started making tangible progress. He set up his first real office in a building right across the street from the Venn that the Kresge Foundation had practically given him.

Early in 1995, the nonprofit Detroit Renaissance, flush with a $500,000 grant from the Hudson-Webber Foundation, loaned Midtown $77,000 to get the Stuber-Stone going. Ten months later Slattery finally convinced two local banks that had turned the project down for 10 straight years to fully fund its restoration. Completed in 1997, the building’s 13 striking, two-bedroom lofts are fully occupied and rent for between $900 and $1,200. He’s renting five more on the second floor of his office building.

In 1998, Detroit Renaissance came up with more pre-development cash and, reversing 12 years of steady refusals from the banks, Slattery got the money to restore the Venn. It is now a gorgeous place, typical of Midtown’s meticulous work: an imposing Victorian stone facade, handsome marble steps and columns, sparkling maple floors that "float" on sound-absorbing material, custom wood fireplace mantels, exposed brickwork, ductwork and ceilings, high-end kitchen appliances and individual back porches. Slattery quickly sold five of the Venn’s six condos for around $150,000 each. He has also partnered with another developer, J.C. Cataldo, for his largest project to date: converting another industrial building into the Canfield Lofts, a 35-unit masterpiece; 26 units are already sold.

Since 1997, Midtown has, after so many lean years, spent close to $5 million on restoration. Now the company is hard at work on the Edman, also across the street from his old house. It, too, promises to be a jewel; many units will have cathedral ceilings and exquisite balconies. Then it’s on to the Mahatwa, right across the street from a freshly rehabbed fire station and a row of restored Victorian mansions. Slattery picked it up for a song when a bank foreclosed on it. He’s renaming it the 434; it will feature eight two-story and four "ranch" condos.

Slattery is now hard at work on his next venture, an expanse of vacant lots, tumbled-down houses and mysteriously faceless cinderblock buildings that stretch to the Lodge Expressway. Now that he’s paying a tiny full-time staff, he must always have several projects going at the same time. He’s learning a little more every day about both business and human nature.

"I am always seeing if I am actually improving or if I am still doing the same dumb shit I did last year," he says. "If you are negative, you are like a magnet. I just try to stay positive."

There’s a stunning photograph of Monument Valley, Utah, on his office wall, a gift from his father-in-law. Millennia ago those gorgeous, huge nubs in the sand were full-blooded mountains. The photo is simply entitled, "The Essence of Persistence."

"We’re going out there for a vacation soon," he says. "I can’t wait to see what the stars look like."

Outside his office, cruel March winds tear at once-proud buildings. But the promise of spring is in the air.

Jim Dulzo is a former Metro Times managing editor and host of "The Jim Dulzo Program," Saturdays at 7 p.m. on WDET-FM 101.9.