Business

Kaffer: Detroit Through the Eyes of the Morouns

March 30, 2015, 12:46 PM

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Michigan Central Train Station/ Flickr photo.

Matty Moroun isn't the most popular guy in Metro Detroit. In fact, often times the mention of his name brings a visceral response.

Detroit Free Press Columnist Nancy Kaffer Press tags along with Matty Moroun's son, Matt Moroun, and gets the more upbeat family perspective on their Michigan Central Station in Corktown and other real estate holdings in the city.

The younger Moroun tells Kaffer the family, which acquired the train station in 1995, couldn't tear down the structure.

"It would be like the mark of Cain, " he told her. "We could never rub it off."

Kaffer writes:

Two years ago, new windows started appearing in the train station. Now, the family has contracted with Chamberlain Metal and Glass of St. Clair to replace the station's 1,000-some windows. It's welcome news, but it's a long time coming. For 20 years, the station's been largely untouched. Why wait so long? And why now?

Moroun pauses, again. "I have no good answer," he says. "And I'm not going to make something up."

Apparently, it's not a lot of fun to own the train station, not when its dereliction provides constant fodder for criticism of your family, particularly your father. And yet Moroun is not prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to rehab the train station without, as he says, a feasible economic development opportunity.

Kaffer writes that she drove around the city with Moroun in his SUV. She says she trashed the family in a Free Press Editorial, and  Matt Moroun called to say they were not slum landlords.

She writes:

For the most part, the properties that Moroun and I (accompanied by an assistant and former state legislator Shanelle Jackson, now director of public relations for the Ambassador Bridge Co.) visited were exactly as represented: Neatly maintained vacant lots, clear of debris and mowed. One parcel with a decrepit building — Moroun says it's on his company's demo list — was adequately secured.

Along the way, Jackson counters my contention that the Moroun family isn't as generous as some metro-area billionaires: She's currently reviewing about $100,000 worth of requests for funds. The family simply doesn't choose to publicize its donations, she says.

One tenant-occupied property had some fence-line debris, the kind that accumulates toward the end of winter. Moroun said he'd have the tenant told to clean it up. Many of the properties Moroun showed me were in productive use — trucking hubs, logistics centers — including a facility built several years back at the I-94 industrial park where the Morouns' just-purchased property is located.

 


Read more:  Detroit Free Press


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