By Bill McGraw
On East Milwaukee Avenue in central Detroit, Logan Siegel lives in a 116-year-old building with rust-colored brick that has been rehabbed and converted into nine condos owned by a diverse group of professionals. The value of the property has tripled in the past five years.
The surrounding landscape is foreboding, though: Structures that are collapsing upon themselves, wildly overgrown vacant lots, illegal dumping, glass-strewn roads and ubiquitous graffiti. The two-story building across from Siegel’s home is boarded up; to the east is a DTE Energy facility surrounded by an 18-foot cement wall topped with razor wire. It looks like a maximum security prison.
Despite the raw surroundings, Siegel has met many people in the past three years who are impatient to move in. “Just about every time that I’m working outside my building, people stop by, sometimes a couple times a day, just asking if units are available to rent or buy,” he said. “When you tell them there’s nothing available, they get very upset because there is nothing in the area.”
Siegel’s neighborhood is named Milwaukee Junction, once one of the world’s most productive industrial zones, the place where Henry Ford began experimenting with the Model T and the assembly line. It’s a sprawling area around the I-75/I-94 interchange that is old and beat up and exists mostly off the radar of local media and metro area residents. While its dynamic past is gradually forgotten, Milwaukee Junction’s immediate future seems increasingly clear: It appears to be Detroit’s next hot neighborhood. MORE