The Sunday New York Times’ Dan Gilbert profile should be assigned to the “late to the party” file. The piece feels very 18 months ago, even by national media standards. It’s so untimely that it only mentions Gilbert’s recent and commendable efforts at “placemaking” — a fancy term for making things look nice — almost as an afterthought following some tedious paragraphs about a Quicken employee's Nerf gun fun times.
Maybe the Grey Lady of Journalism was sick the day they cautioned against burying the lede in J-School.
However, the Times’ treatment of the Quicken Loans CEO is fascinating for the way it treats Gilbert’s downtown play as some kind of philanthropic effort rather than a shrewd business strategy.
They brand him a missionary and his efforts a rescue mission. These are odd words to describe a billionaire acquiring downtown real estate in the buyer’s market created by the some epically poor local real estate managers — hello, Northern Group! — and the global economic collapse. Especially when you consider Gilbert is filling much of this space with his own employees. Cheap office space is hardly a risky venture when your enterprise needs office space.
Gilbert is far less the Doctors Without Borders figure the Times’ narrative attempts to describe and far more like Billy Beane, at least the Michael Lewis version of the Oakland A’s GM, going after assets undervalued in an inefficient marketplace.
Bravo to him for that. Seriously. If just a few people recognized the value inherent in a Detroit most have dismissed as worthless, then Detroit wouldn’t look so Detroit-y.
But how strange is it that smart business decisions in this town are almost always dressed up as some kind of faux-philanthropy? In any other city, Dan Gilbert does what he’s doing in Detroit and six other rich guys go: I wish I thought of that. Here, we pretend he’s the second coming of Father Solanus Casey.
This has to stop. Not because of Dan Gilbert, he’ll be fine regardless, but because Detroit could use those six other rich guys trying to get richer in Detroit and, even more importantly, a few thousand smaller entrepreneurs who are less worried about impressing foundation managers with bullshit rhetoric about “social responsibility” and more concerned with providing goods and services to an underserved marketplace at a tidy profit.
You know, commerce.
I'm tired of hearing earnest Detroit entrepreneurs prattle on about how they're helping and how they need your KickStarter contribution. If you want to "help," go tutor a school kid. If you're starting a business, great, tell me about the goods and services you'll be making and selling. If you want to be an "ethical entrepreneur" pay your taxes on time don't overfill your dumpsters, and maybe sell something other than cigarettes. None of which requires additional panels on ethical entrepreneurship.
Detroit needs more commerce and less philanthropy. At the risk of sounding glib, it’s easier to get lunch at a soup kitchen in Detroit than it is to purchase the ingredients to make soup.
But this city will never get to a place where it has a normal market economy, and the self-sufficiency it provides, that exists even in other distressed American cities if we continue to dress up even obvious profit-making ventures in the language of charity.
