How Ford Motor Company is reshaping Detroit into the next great tech hub

For decades, the once-elegant Michigan Central train station has lain abandoned and dilapidated, above Detroit’s oldest neighborhood. This architectural beauty opened in 1913 at the height of Detroit’s economic and industrial power.

But public transportation was not great in the Motor City, and Detroit’s economic woes meant that traffic through the grand station became increasingly sparse. The last train left Michigan Central in 1988. Left to rot, the building became an international symbol of Detroit’s decline, a romantic icon of the city’s faded former glory.

That all changed on June 6, 2024, when the new Michigan Central building opened to the public with a star-studded concert that drew tens of thousands of cheering Detroiters to the newly renovated building. After more than 40 years of neglect, Michigan Central is now the 30-acre site of Ford Motor Co.’s ambitious new campus. With major companies like Google buying in and new talent growth models like venture platform Newlab, the new campus could be Detroit’s chance to rewrite the playbook for how Midwestern cities attract top tech talent.

The city’s new “microeconomy,” centered around the campus of Central Michigan University, isn’t looking to be the next Silicon Valley. Instead, business and civic leaders are building on Detroit’s long history as a hub of innovation to build a new kind of industry that has the potential to dramatically change the outlook of the neighborhood—and greater Detroit.

Once dormant neighborhoods come back to life

The neighborhoods surrounding Central Michigan are home to some of the city’s most vibrant and diverse populations. Corktown, Detroit’s oldest neighborhood, was founded by Irish immigrants fleeing famine in their homeland in the 1840s. It remains one of the city’s few remaining Victorian neighborhoods. Nearby Southwest Detroit has a vibrant Mexican-American community.

As with most of the rest of the city, residents of Corktown and southwest Detroit were hit hard by the Great Recession: Michigan experienced highest unemployment rate During the recession of October 2009, growth was 15.3 percent. But both neighborhoods showed early signs of recovery. By the mid-2000s, Michigan Avenue in Corktown had become a hub for bars and restaurants as younger residents moved in. When Matt Boskard opened his restaurant Bobcat Bonnie’s in 2015, he says it was a different time in Corktown. “The idea that Ford was going to buy [the train station] “If that were the case, people would have said, ‘This will never happen,’” Boskard says. On the night of the concert at Michigan Central, Bobcat Pony sales were up 300 percent from the previous week, as visitors flocked to Corktown to see Jack White, Diana Ross and Eminem perform in front of the old train station. Since then, his business has continued to boom. “It’s like a shot in the arm,” he says, with Bobcat Pony the following weekend pulling in double its usual summer weekend sales.

tip the scales

Auto manufacturing has always been at the heart of Detroit’s industrial heritage. Thanks to its history of automotive entrepreneurship, coupled with its relatively low cost of living, Detroit began attracting startups in greater numbers after the recession, and has gradually gained momentum. In 2022, Startup Genome‘s Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2022 The city is ranked number one. Emerging startup scene Globally.

A key component of the mobile campus is Newlab Detroit, housed in a former Detroit Public Schools book warehouse, behind the massive train station. Just over a year after opening, Newlab now hosts 100 member companies from around the world. These startups, 40 percent of which are from out of state or country, have injected new energy into Corktown. Together, Ford and other companies in the area are expected to create 5,000 new jobs by 2028. Newlab Detroit’s member companies have collectively raised $616 million in venture capital — about half of all venture capital raised in Michigan in 2022.

“This is just the beginning,” says Mark de la Vergne, director of economic innovation and policy at Michigan Central. “We don’t look at this as linear growth. We look at this as exponential growth.” Michigan Central and New Lab are focusing on recruiting hard-core tech companies that need comprehensive manufacturing and logistics support. “We’re focusing on very early-stage companies,” says de la Vergne. “For them, $20,000 or $50,000 is a big deal. It’s going to help them get the company here and tip the balance.” Such a small investment by a venture capitalist or in the form of high-tech equipment has a big impact on these small companies, he says.

De la Vergne relies on Michigan Central’s relationships with Detroit-based startups to spread the word. “Word of mouth from entrepreneurs is critical,” he says. “One company here called Bloom was focused on integrating the micro-mobility supply chain and building the supply chain for that industry here in Detroit. [Now] They’re going out to attract companies from Brooklyn nonstop now” to bring them to Michigan Central.

Michigan Central is relying on partnerships with universities like Wayne State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Michigan Innovation Center, as well as the Detroit Tech Town incubator, “to build the community and programming that will be essential to making this a great place for entrepreneurs to succeed,” says De La Vergne.

Early-stage mobility companies are taking advantage of Detroit’s fast-track policy for innovative new projects located in the Transportation Innovation District, centered around the train station building. The city of Detroit’s Transportation Innovation Office first introduced the district in 2023 to expedite the permitting process for transportation technology experiments. So far, the office has issued pilot permits for a crossing guard robot, a computer vision-based sensor that monitors vehicle and pedestrian traffic, an air quality monitor, and an autonomous food waste pickup system.

Partners in the economic system

The public-private partnerships that helped shape Michigan Central’s campus extend far beyond its 30 acres. Thanks to the restaurant and retail boom in Corktown and the adjacent Southwest Detroit neighborhood in the mid-2000s, more and more businesses are looking to become part of the vibrant scene in the commuter corridor. “This whole ecosystem is starting to come together to build community and programming, and that’s going to be essential to making this a great place for entrepreneurs to succeed,” says De La Vergne.

Since 2018, Ford and Michigan Central have held a series of community outreach events and maintained an active social and traditional media campaign to engage neighborhoods and the greater Detroit area in the progress and plans for the campus. That’s an approach that Detroit’s second-tier soccer league, Detroit City FC, is also taking. Just three blocks west of the train station in southwest Detroit, Detroit City FC announced on May 16 that it has acquired a 5.5-acre site of an abandoned hospital to build a new USL Championship stadium.

At a May 20 meeting with DCFC fans and loyalists, co-owners Sean Mann, Todd Kropp and Alex Wright emphasized their community ties. All three are longtime residents of Corktown, or southwest Detroit. Todd Kropp, the director of operations, emphasized their dedication to leading the stadium project with community input that is “doable, feasible” and “on a scale that makes sense for this location in this neighborhood.”

By June 6, the buzz around the first phase of Michigan Central’s activation was heating up. At nearby Albino, owner David Richer noticed the neighborhood had changed even a year ago, when his restaurant first opened. “Fifty to 70 percent of the people in the room were heading down the street to the party,” he says. Since then, traffic to his restaurant has steadily increased, to the point where the place is often fully booked even on Mondays or Tuesdays.

It doesn’t happen every week, of course, but Richer has noticed a noticeable increase in business in the weeks since the Michigan Central concert and the start of public tours of the station. “If you walk by on a Monday, it’s still the same old Corktown, quiet and calm, but on the weekends, it comes alive,” he says. Richer has also noticed a big increase in bookings from trade groups—not just Ford Motor Company, but from companies all over Detroit and other parts of the country, in town for meetings.

Detroit is the next Detroit

Every few years, a new sensationalist article appears touting Detroit as “the next Silicon Valley.” But software entrepreneur Brian Molloy disagrees. Born and raised in the Detroit metropolitan area, he spent 12 years in Silicon Valley and founded data startup Swvl before returning to his roots in 2011.

Since then, he has assembled a chic corner of real estate a few blocks from the Ford campus and across the street from Albino. Ballet Real Estate has completed three historic renovations and three new buildings, combining retail, restaurants, offices and residential space. Molloy sees an opportunity to “capitalize on the buzz” around the reopening of the historic train station. “We’ve seen a slight surge of visitors to Corktown” since the 2018 announcement, he says.

But Molloy is still not entirely convinced that Detroit is the “next Silicon Valley.” “Detroit doesn’t have to be the next Silicon Valley,” he says. “All we need is a healthy small business ecosystem, with capital flowing in and value created. I think that’s entirely possible.”

De la Verne doesn’t buy the comparisons between Detroit and Silicon Valley, or the hype a few years ago that Detroit was the new Brooklyn. “It’s not a zero-sum game,” De la Verne says. “The idea is to grow the pie. Detroit is the next Detroit.”