Design Build Green Hub aims to grow contractor careers in Southwest Detroit

In Southwest Detroit’s Hubbard-Richard neighborhood, a dark, gray-blue Queen Anne house sits on the corner of 18^th and Porter streets, adjacent to Stanton Park. While the newly renovated house is similar to the historic homes that share its block, its distinctive flair hints at something special happening on the inside.

Flat, cement spirals sit atop a gravel-filled “lawn.” Stratified cement steps resemble stacks of newspapers and lead to a colorful, front-door mural where cerulean hands surround a honey bee inside a vibrant green bubble. An equally striking flame-topped heart crowns the façade, representing the Latino heritage and sustainable building practices that form the soul of the Detroit Design Build Green Hub.

The project is the brainchild of Detroit Future Ops (DFO), the social outreach arm of AGI Construction. Owned by married couple Luis Ali and Tanya Saldivar-Ali, AGI is a community development-focused construction company that specializes in neighborhood churches, schools, nonprofits, and small businesses with an aim to support like-minded contractors.

The idea stemmed from the couple’s own challenges in trying to grow their business.

“We were hitting a lot of barriers,” Saldivar-Ali says. “How do we access capital? How do we access some of the opportunities through the city state portals? How do we get mentorship? There were a lot of unknowns.”

As they navigated their growth, the other challenge was finding certified subcontractors with the required licensing and documentation, especially since hiring locally was a priority.

“Skilled trades are limited,” Ali says. “The unions are pulling everybody in on the big projects downtown, and so when a community organization comes [with a job], I’m like, ‘OK, well we’re kind of limited because, there’s just not that many small companies that have got their paperwork together.’”

The couple found themselves organically working with local subcontractors to formalize their businesses, and the basis for the Hub was formed.

The training process occurs on multiple levels: for smaller contractors or those newer to the business, the Hub offers a space where they can access free entrepreneurship courses to grow their businesses. This includes a partnership with ProsperUs Detroit, an organization that provides training, business services, and micro-lending to local entrepreneurs.

Although these contractors have trade skills, Ali said they often lack basic business knowledge — which prevents them from taking on larger projects. This includes training on setting quotes, pulling permits, licensing, using business software, creating contracts, and general project management.

“Multiple people can do the work, but can [they] do the documentation, can [they] do the paperwork, can [they] do everything it takes on the back end before [they] actually start work?” Ali says. “That’s where a lot of people have pitfalls.”

For more established contractors, DFO/AGI offers a mentorship program where mentees can work with Ali and his team directly and receive guidance on their own projects and, eventually, referrals.

One of AGI/DFO’s first mentees was Selicio Alvarado, owner of Phase Construction Consultants, who was part of the pilot mentorship group. AGI needed help with the Hub’s renovations, and while Alvarado’s company focused on residential construction, he wanted to learn about the commercial end of the business, especially in how to establish accurate quotes and learn commercial building codes. Alvarado says Ali was a patient teacher and clear at explaining his processes and why, which made it easier to learn.

He has since gone on to work with a commercial construction company and credits AGI/DFO for that success.

“They really gave me the confidence and the foundation of my commercial knowledge to be able to keep moving forward,” Alvarado says. “It’s been a fantastic, life-changing experience.”

Alvarado has also continued paying that knowledge forward as an instructor at the Hub, which is important to him.

“I believe in freely giving away all of the knowledge that I have to empower those around me,” he says. “Tanya and Luis gave me that opportunity multiple times to really flex my strength and… help the people in our community.”

Saldivar-Ali and Ali credit having strong mentors themselves in contributing to their own success and it’s something they wanted to pass on to others.

One of their closest mentors is Frank Venegas, owner of Ideal Group, one of Michigan’s largest minority-owned general contractors and a key supplier to General Motors. Venegas has known the couple for more than 25 years and says they watched his company grow and observed what was possible, especially Saldivar-Ali.

“She just listens and listens. She’s seen how we grew, and I know when she watched us grow, she said, ‘I’m going to grow just like them too,’” he says. “I’m so proud that I had my chance to help them, but most importantly, they did it, and they did it for themselves and [the] city of Detroit and Southwest Detroit, and the place is gorgeous.”

Ali says Venegas helped guide them in establishing AGI’s community-focused identity, and later referred work to them.

“For someone like [that] to sit down with us on a monthly basis and say, ‘Where are you at?’ ‘What’s your game plan?’ [was important],” he says.

As its outside suggests, sustainability is a key factor for the Detroit Design Build Green Hub — which also serves as the headquarters for AGI and DFO — on both a community level and an environmental level. The company prioritizes working with members of their own majority-Latino community to support its development and break down barriers to opportunity. Ali says business advancement trainings are often cost-prohibitive, which limits their ability to grow.

“In the urban neighborhoods or the city of Detroit, we’ve all been doing this work for a long time, and so it’s like, if you can’t get to that high level and you’re not within corporate America, where are you going to get that training from?” he says.

Although the program is targeted to minority contractors, Ali says it is open to all. What’s most important, he says, is to find like-minded people.

“If you’re looking to help community… you have to show me your fruit, you have to show me where you’re at, what are you working on, what takes up your time…” he says. “If it’s all about profit for you, then you’re probably not going to want to be around us too long, because you’re going to make money, but there’s more to it than that.”

From an environmental perspective, the goal is to share knowledge with the community on how to make home renovations more financially accessible by investing in systems that reduce utility and maintenance costs in the long run.

In researching community hubs, Saldivar-Ali was seeing a lot of trends in green infrastructure, but they weren’t accessible to most Detroiters.

“The return on investment would take people decades,” she says. “Most people don’t have decades of long-term wealth to think about, what does it look like to save in the future?”

In that regard, the house has served as a guinea pig to test affordable green systems, especially with a shared resource model. The distinctive front yard is a bioswale that absorbs and filters stormwater runoff, developed in partnership with Citizen Robotics, Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision, and Hamp Mathews and Associates. This benefits the environment by removing water pollutants and reducing the strain on the city’s aging sewer system, which can lead to flooding and water contamination.

But it can also help local homes and organizations save on city water fees, which are higher for places with large impervious surfaces, like church parking lots, which Ali says could be charged up to $800 a month.

“This is just a small-scale example of how it can work and how it really could be multiple people tied into the same system… we could do this on every block, and this would avoid water running into the city sewer system,” he says. “These are kind of answers to the bigger problem that we have all over the city of Detroit.”

The home also features a new metal roof and a spray foamed-insulated ceiling in the former attic space to improve energy efficiency.

“Our heating system might kick on three times a day… in the wintertime, that’s how tight the building is,” Ali says. “That’s going to save you cost, that’s energy efficient, it’s sustainable. If we can all just figure out how to get our houses insulated properly, that’s a huge win.”

Other sustainability experiments, they’ve found, were less cost-effective to be implemented or recommended to others. An inquiry into solar panels found the length of the ROI impractical. The unique, layered porch steps are made of 3D-printed Hardie Board, a durable fiber cement material that is more sustainable than traditional concrete. They hoped these would be an affordable, long-lasting solution for residents with deteriorating wooden steps, but the expense of inserting the heavy steps outweighed the cost savings.

Managing the home’s drafty historic windows was also a costly lesson. After investing in new, expensive energy efficient windows, Saldivar-Ali says a green consultant told them simply securing and caulking the original windows may have been more cost efficient.

“I just thought that that was really interesting because it wasn’t like, ‘Yeah, go out and buy $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 of windows that are energy efficient,” she says. “It was like, ‘No, caulk all your windows first, and if you can restore them and fix them, then do that.’”

The house itself holds special community significance. Built in 1900, Salvidar-Ali says it was owned for generations by a Mexican family that moved to Detroit in the 1930s and served as a safe home in the 1950s and ’60s for newly arrived Mexican laborers, including Salvidar-Ali’s own father.

It is also the former home of Frank Lozano, a beloved educator and musician in the community. Salvidar-Ali says he was the principal at her own elementary school, the now-closed Webster Elementary School, and the founder of Panchito and the Latin Orchestra, a popular local swing Latin band. Salvidar-Ali says she remembers Lozano’s strong sense of civic pride and love of music, and has fond memories of him playing music over the school’s PA system and supporting students’ Hispanic heritage.

“There was a lot of personal connection and emotional connection to the house,” she says. “After that, I was like, ‘I’m sold.’”

Venegas says he’s proud of what the couple has accomplished, and the Hub is an inspiration for others.

“When people go to Luis and Tanya’s house, it will really give someone a total idea on what can be done,” he says, “and I think that’s the most important thing about that house.”