Regular readers will know I'm a sucker for a good real estate story and Fortune's David Whitford delivers today with a feature on how stock broker John Hantz wants to reclaim Detroit as farmland.
The story is on how Detroit's economic collapse has reversed the usual logic of development that saw farming communities turned into suburbs when the land became more valuable as housing than it was as agriculture and how one somewhat shady-sounding financial services provider wants to replace abandoned lots with hyrodponics.
Hantz thinks farming could do his city a lot of good: restore big chunks of tax-delinquent, resource-draining urban blight to pastoral productivity; provide decent jobs with benefits; supply local markets and restaurants with fresh produce; attract tourists from all over the world; and -- most important of all -- stimulate development around the edges as the local land market tilts from stultifying abundance to something more like scarcity and investors move in. Hantz is willing to commit $30 million to the project. He'll start with a pilot program this spring involving up to 50 acres on Detroit's east side. "Out of the gates," he says, "it'll be the largest urban farm in the world."
The story winds through Detroit's urban emptiness - down more than 50% in population from its peak, Hantz's run-ins with securities regulators, competition from existing co-op agriculture projects in the city and his own basic lack of farm knowledge (he's been consulting with a professor from Kellogg on how to do this).
It ads to a great story of a man and his dream - and one of the few rational proposals out there.
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