Is Dan Gilbert Detroit’s New Superhero?

This art­icle is part of a weeklong Amer­ica 360 series on De­troit.

DE­TROIT ““ The signs are every­where: “Op­por­tun­ity De­troit.” They hang from light posts, bill­boards, and buses, paid for by the most power­ful man in this city. He’s the cata­lyst for this city’s eco­nom­ic res­tor­a­tion, and some cit­izens are hail­ing him as the sa­vior of De­troit.

And no, he’s not the new may­or.

Dan Gil­bert doesn’t need a polit­ic­al title; elec­ted of­fice could hardly aug­ment his fin­an­cial in­flu­ence over De­troit. The founder and chair­man of Rock Ven­tures, an um­brella en­tity that in­cludes Quick­en Loans and scores of oth­er prop­er­ties, Gil­bert has con­sol­id­ated power in the re­gion in an as­ton­ish­ingly short time. First, he moved Quick­en Loans’ headquar­ters from the sub­urbs to down­town in Au­gust 2010. In the three-and-a-half years since, Gil­bert has es­tab­lished him­self as De­troit’s de facto CEO. He now con­trols more than 40 down­town prop­er­ties — cov­er­ing nearly 8 mil­lion square feet of real es­tate — and his com­pan­ies have shif­ted more than 12,000 em­ploy­ees in­to the city. To date, Gil­bert’s total in­vest­ment in De­troit nears $1.5 bil­lion. (For com­par­is­on, the city’s an­nu­al budget for 2013 was $1.12 bil­lion.)

More than just a CEO, Gil­bert has taken on out­size roles as De­troit’s chief boost­er, de­veloper, and now, se­cur­ity of­ficer. His com­pany squires out-of-town re­port­ers and pro­spect­ive busi­nesses on down­town tours, selling spe­cif­ic points of pro­gress and try­ing to frame De­troit as Amer­ica’s smartest urb­an in­vest­ment. He is re­cruit­ing new busi­nesses (more than 100 so far) and is evan­gel­ic­al about the im­port­ance of cre­at­ing spaces that draw foot traffic in down­town and midtown neigh­bor­hoods.

And, in the ab­sence of a func­tion­ing, solvent loc­al gov­ern­ment, Gil­bert has taken it upon him­self to con­front safety con­cerns by in­stalling a state-of-the-art sur­veil­lance sys­tem down­town to sup­ple­ment an un­der­fun­ded and un­der­manned De­troit Po­lice De­part­ment. The ACLU says it dis­ap­proves of this giv­en the po­ten­tial pri­vacy con­cerns but says it can­not pre­vent busi­ness own­ers from mon­it­or­ing their own prop­er­ties.

In a lengthy in­ter­view, Gil­bert said he is just “filling some of the void” cre­ated by years of fisc­al mis­man­age­ment and polit­ic­al cor­rup­tion. He says he is do­ing for De­troit what the city can­not do for it­self — even if it gives him un­pre­ced­en­ted, un­elec­ted power over Michigan’s largest met­ro­pol­is. “If it serves as some form of a bridge un­til the city gets fin­an­cially health­i­er, that’s OK,” Gil­bert says. “If we have to do that, we’ll do it. We can af­ford it.”

That he can. Gil­bert’s net worth was es­tim­ated at $3.9 bil­lion last Septem­ber by For­bes, up from $1.9 bil­lion one year earli­er. His for­tune is self-made. After start­ing Rock Fin­an­cial, a mort­gage com­pany he launched with sav­ings from de­liv­er­ing piz­zas as a stu­dent at Michigan State Uni­versity, Gil­bert sold it for $532 mil­lion in 1999. Three years later, he bought back the com­pany, re­named Quick­en Loans, for $64 mil­lion. Today it is the coun­try’s largest on­line lender and eas­ily the biggest money­maker for Rock Ven­tures. Among a host of oth­er hold­ings, Gil­bert, 52, owns the NBA’s Clev­e­land Cava­liers and op­er­ates the team’s sta­di­um, Quick­en Loans Arena.

Gil­bert, a shrewd busi­ness­man, is also a nat­ive son. Like his fath­er and grand­fath­er, he was born in De­troit and grew up just out­side the city in South­field. Gil­bert’s gen­er­a­tion largely saw De­troit as a battered city, bleed­ing res­id­ents, yet he says the still-re­cent memory of a majest­ic Mo­tor City cap­tiv­ated him. Dec­ades later, as De­troit’s prop­erty val­ues hit rock bot­tom, Gil­bert watched a parade of col­lege gradu­ates re­ject his of­fers to work in isol­ated sub­urb­an struc­tures.

So, Gil­bert thought he could merge his per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al goals by re­viv­ing De­troit and tak­ing ad­vant­age of what he calls the city’s “sky­scraper sale.” He saw him­self renov­at­ing down­town his­tor­ic build­ings and filling them with his own em­ploy­ees. At the same time, he could ex­pand his busi­ness em­pire by lur­ing busi­nesses to a newly vi­brant “urb­an core,” where they would then rent space in his prop­er­ties. It was an am­bi­tious and risky move, even for such a rich guy.

“Not every­body has the stom­ach for it,” says Avis C. Vid­al, a pro­fess­or of Urb­an Stud­ies and Plan­ning at Wayne State Uni­versity in De­troit. “There’s a lot of risk go­ing in­to this mar­ket, and [Gil­bert] is either go­ing to be a big win­ner or a big loser.”

Giv­en dec­ades of race and class ten­sion between De­troit and sur­round­ing sub­urbs, some here are skep­tic­al about any­one — much less a white man from South­field — mono­pol­iz­ing the city’s down­town real es­tate. And they’ve seen this movie be­fore, with oth­er wealthy white busi­ness­men and de­velopers — such as Mike Il­litch, own­er of two loc­al pro­fes­sion­al sports teams — hailed as the po­ten­tial her­oes who would res­cue De­troit. Quick­en Loans’ role in the subprime mort­gage crisis and Gil­bert’s cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions to the now-in­car­cer­ated former May­or Kwame Kilpatrick have only provided more am­muni­tion for his crit­ics.

And ul­ti­mately, there is the fact that Gil­bert is a busi­ness­man, not a phil­an­throp­ist. He ac­know­ledges that by pro­mot­ing De­troit’s re­sur­gence, he is also help­ing out his own fin­an­cial self-in­terest, and he makes no apo­lo­gies for it. “We call it do­ing well by do­ing good,” Gil­bert says. “We don’t see any con­flict in that.”

Still, most De­troiters are buy­ing in. Gil­bert is widely viewed as a good cor­por­ate cit­izen, un­like oth­er loc­al ty­coons who have been re­viled by res­id­ents for pur­chas­ing prop­er­ties only to let them sit idle or raze them for flat park­ing lots. May­or Mike Dug­gan, who took of­fice in Janu­ary, praises the im­pact of Gil­bert’s ef­forts in mak­ing De­troit a more at­tract­ive place for young pro­fes­sion­als to live. “This next gen­er­a­tion has an aw­ful lots of folks who don’t want that ‘live in the sub­rbs with a minivan’ ex­per­i­ence. They want to be in the urb­an set­ting,” says Dug­gan. “For a lot of people, Dan Gil­bert has provided that op­por­tun­ity here.”

Gil­bert’s (and the city’s) next big chal­lenge is to spread this suc­cess to De­troit’s sprawl­ing out­er neigh­bor­hoods, many dev­ast­ated by aban­don­ment. De­troit can nev­er re­gain its repu­ta­tion as a world-class met­ro­pol­is while its poorest sec­tions rot around a re­vital­ized down­town. Nor can the city solve its oth­er ma­jor prob­lems like crime, edu­ca­tion, or the lack of jobs without first elim­in­at­ing De­troit’s blight. “Not part of it, not some of it, not most of it, but all of it,” Gil­bert says. De­troit Emer­gency Man­ager Kevyn Orr es­tim­ates that it costs $8,500 to de­mol­ish a house here; De­troit has roughly 78,000 aban­doned build­ings.

Still, Gil­bert re­mains un­daun­ted. As the co­chair of the De­troit Blight Task Force, a privately fun­ded group, he is ex­ecut­ing a vast sur­vey pro­ject. Teams are as­sess­ing 382,000 par­cels of prop­erty to pro­duce a data­base that will al­low the task force to ana­lyze and un­der­stand the scope of the prob­lem. Then, Gil­bert and his team will present the find­ings and de­vel­op a plan by this spring to ab­ol­ish the city’s blight.

It’s likely to be an am­bi­tious and in­cred­ibly ex­pens­ive pro­pos­al, po­ten­tially cost­ing north of a half bil­lion dol­lars if every va­cant struc­ture is razed. And it’s one that may well be­ne­fit Gil­bert in the long run. But if he is known for one thing around here, it is for reach­ing for his wal­let when De­troit can’t cov­er its tab and bet­ting, in the end, that he’ll get paid back in some way.