I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
If there’s one major bright spot to all the talk about Detroit’s many vacant and abandoned lots these days, it’s the focus on the city’s brave new urban farming future.
Fortune’s David Whitford takes us there in an in-depth story posted on Time Inc.’s Assignment Detroit page earlier this afternoon. If you’ve got the time, it’s worth the read.
Whitford profiles Detroit resident and financial services company owner John Hantz’s plans for commercial urban farms — and his pledge to jump start the project with $30 million of his own fortune. His aims to launch his agricultural start-up on up to 50 acres of east side property, with the first seedlings sprouting sometime this coming spring.
But hands down my favorite part of the story is artist Bryan Christie’s futuristic rendering of what Hantz Farms might look like — complete with solar panels, windmills, vertical growing systems, and new development on the periphery.
Here’s how Whitford describes the big picture plan to develop what Hantz claims will be from its inception the world’s largest urban farm:
Yes, a farm. A large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit. 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.
The story goes on to point out how Detroit is particularly well-suited to be the pioneer in large-scale, for-profit urban farming and how Hantz is seeking “a zoning adjustment that would create a new, lower tax rate for agriculture.”
At the same time, the story (or maybe it’s just Hantz?) downplays the racial divide when it comes to the city existing urban farming movement. For more on that, check out this story from a couple months ago.
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