If you stroll around Grand Circus Park in downtown Detroit, you might now and then be bugged by panhandlers begging for money.
“Can you help me out?” they may ask, with eye contact, one palm up.
They could be shabbily dressed and otherwise unkempt, as if they’ve slept in soiled, wrinkled clothes. Perhaps they show some missing teeth or beard stubble or even emit an odor.
If you feel generous enough, you might contribute pocket change or even a dollar bill. Sometimes, it feels good to give.
In contrast, consider Christopher Ilitch, another denizen of that neighborhood. He and his billionaire family run two sports teams, two stadiums, the Fox Theater, a pizza chain, and a gold-gushing gambling casino. Chris Ilitch is hardly a sidewalk panhandler.
Clean-shaven and wearing well-cut suits, his full smile shines and he works in spiffy Woodward Avenue office space well above the riff-raff. He might even smell good, although few news media ever get near enough to know.
But — like the sidewalk beggar — Ilitch also has his hand out, again. In a proposed real estate development deal, the pizza king and his business partners want your money, again, and lots of it. They just might get it, too, and this cheesy deal could even do some good.
This time, the figure is almost $800 million in public funds, more than half the project cost of $1.5 billion. They promise to construct or restore 10 buildings in the vicinity of Ilitch Village, the entertainment and sports ghetto stretching north up the Woodward corridor from the Ilitch baseball park to the Ilitch hockey arena.
Tellingly, Ilitch isn’t pitching it himself in the local news media. While in Lakeland, Florida, for Tigers’ spring training last month, the team owner avoided reporters, and that may be wise. In public appearances, he seems timid, stiff, scripted, and unconvincing.
Instead, Ilitch assigned this charm offensive to Rian English Barnhill, a vice-president for Ilitch’s Olympia Development; and Andrew Cantor, executive vice-president of development for Related Companies, Ilitch’s New York partner run by Stephen Ross.
Speaking with Stephen Henderson on “Detroit Today” on WDET-FM, even this tag team of silver-tongued spinners admitted the so-called “District Detroit” didn’t prosper the way the Ilitches promised less than a decade ago when the public helped fund their Little Caesars Arena.
After citing recent improvements to a few Ilitch properties, Olympia’s Barnhill conceded: “That said, I do understand that that doesn’t necessarily match the big vision that was laid out many years ago.”
In this case, “many” is “nine,” and the “vision” promised offices, hotels, apartments, and retail space in a walkable environment.
Instead, we got an Ilitch arena surrounded by Ilitch parking lots for Ilitch customers spending money at Ilitch entertainment properties.
The new venture promises — you guessed it! — offices, hotels, apartments, and retail space in a walkable environment. But this time is different, Cantor said, while acknowledging previous delays.
“It has taken too long . . . relative to what has been promised,” he said.
Some callers to the show voiced sharp questions.
“Lucy” from Detroit said the deal would boost private profit instead of funding schools and libraries, and asked Barnhill whether any Ilitches actually live in the city. Barnhill nimbly dodged the question and changed the subject. But the caller offered the most memorable line.
“This,” Lucy said, “smacks of extractive capitalism.”
So will Detroit, for a change, say “No” to the Ilitches?
No, Detroit will probably take the bait again. The momentum sure seems in favor. And that might even be a good thing. As a guardedly optimistic native Detroiter with skeptical doubts, I have my own selfish reasons.
I am emotionally — but not economically — invested in the revival of the Woodward Avenue corridor from the Detroit River to the New Center and beyond.
For my first job out of high school, I clerked in what was then called the City-County Building, corner of Woodward and Jefferson. For college at Wayne State University, I took the Woodward bus.
Like many, I have roots in the soil of metro Detroit’s signature street, the spine of our community. I even love the Woodward Dream Cruise, up the road in the suburbs.
By building their ballpark and hockey rink further north in the Woodward corridor, the Ilitches — in their self-centered way — helped extend the frontier toward campus despite holding on for too long to too many decayed properties.
Another burst of construction could further fill in the gaps, although critics justifiably charge that further gentrification will drive some people away.
More businesses, hotels, apartments, and stores — should they be built — might give people more reasons to ride that lonely QLine tram. And spend money. And invest it. What’s good for the Ilitches, in this case, also might benefit the general public.
But even boosters must admit that this deal amounts to socialism for the wealthy. In some ways, the current spirit takes us back to the 1980s, when the Ilitches first bought the Red Wings and began to expand their downtown empire outward like the octopus tentacles of their hockey mascot.
That decade brought Reaganism and its “trickle-down” economic fantasies and the 1987 film Wall Street. Ilitch’s pitch this time harmonizes with that memorable speech by actor Michael Douglas as tycoon Gordon Gekko.
“ . . . Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” Gekko said. “Greed is right. Greed works.”
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