I love metro Detroit, but investing proved difficult
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To say that I’m a proud metro Detroit native is an understatement. “A Detroit chauvinist” is closer to the mark.
It strains my friends’ patience as I extol the brilliant musical performers who called Detroit and its environs home, from Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye to Eminem, Stevie Wonder, Dianna Ross and Madonna.
They know about the Motor City, of course, the Corvettes and Cadillacs and Thunderbirds that rolled off assembly lines to become cultural icons – but they’re surprised to learn how our auto factories morphed almost overnight during World War II to become the “arsenal of democracy” producing tanks, bombers, and military Jeeps. Even fewer know that my hometown hosts one of the nation’s finest museums at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
I also have an especially personal tie to Detroit’s renaissance. My older brother, Gerald E. Rosen, was a federal judge who helped lead the city out of bankruptcy as chief judicial mediator. He put together the “grand bargain” that helped settle Detroit’s debts, allowing for large-scale reinvestment.
Long removed from living in Michigan, I’ve remained an avid follower of the Detroit sports teams. My son Julian grew up in a northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., but he became an avid, lifelong Pistons fan who reveled in their 2004 championship.
It was little surprise when Julian decided to move to metro Detroit after graduating from college in Virginia. A few years later, having watched him bounce around rental flats, I decided to buy him a home in Ferndale.
It was much more than a real estate purchase for me. It was an opportunity to make a concrete investment in metro Detroit’s future, just outside a city on the rebound following decades of decay.
Little did I know that a bizarre Ferndale zoning issue would make the home difficult to sell down the road, and overly strict code enforcement would discourage me from investing again in Detroit-area real estate.
Comical red tape
Julian found a home at the intersection of Woodward Avenue and Nine Mile Road. It was a special property – a 1925 Sears Craftsman home built from a prefabricated kit, a rare vintage house with a storied cache. Julian moved in along with his “homies” – fellow Millennials he chose as roommates – in spring 2017.
Over the next seven years, he turned it into a community hub. They became friends with neighbors. A rising singer/songwriter, Julian and other musicians gave impromptu concerts from the lower back roof, with appreciative neighbors clapping and hooting along from their yards.
Dealing with the City of Ferndale was another matter altogether. I’ve owned rental properties in Virginia and North Carolina, but I never encountered anything like the red tape of Ferndale.
The rental inspections became almost comical whack-a-mole exercises that far exceeded the laudable goal of ensuring tenants’ safety. One year, I was cited for rats. Julian assured me that their source was four dumpsters off my property, used by restaurants backing onto an adjacent alley, but the inspectors rejected this explanation and insisted I hire an exterminator. Showing them a pest-control receipt a few weeks later satisfied them – but didn’t stop the rats in the dumpsters.
Another year, the problem was a tiny piece of missing siding on the dormer atop the house high above the front porch. Even though it wasn’t noticeable without binoculars, Julian and a pal dutifully climbed up and repaired it. Then there were a few items stored beneath tarps up against the back of the house. Hidden from the front, the tarps could only be seen – if you were really looking – from the alley used by the occasional passersby. But they, too, had to be removed along with the items they covered.
Yet the rental frustrations paled next to the problems I encountered in trying to sell the house last year after Julian moved to Denver.
A zoning problem
I quickly got an offer from an out-of-town investor. Weeks later, just a few days before settlement, the investor informed my realtor that his mortgage provider, Chase Bank, had nixed the deal “because of a zoning problem.”
Turns out the lot on which my house was built had been zoned for a parking lot in anticipation of future need to accommodate customers of the restaurants, shops and other establishments lining busy Woodward Avenue.
When my house was built a century ago, it was the Roaring Twenties, and Henry Ford’s Highland Park factory was churning out hundreds of Model T’s a day. With hordes of excited new drivers cruising along Woodward, the concern for adequate parking was understandable.
Yet the need for new housing in booming metro Detroit was even greater, and somehow a number of homes were built on planned parking lots.
When the Chase Bank lenders reviewed my investor’s mortgage application, they asked a logical question: If a fire were to burn down my house, how could the new owner be sure he could rebuild it on a lot zoned for parking?
I tried but failed to get a logical answer from the City of Ferndale. The best it could do, I was told, was write a letter saying the city “had no plans” to enforce the zoning designation, with me paying $100 for this fuzzy assurance.
Even though the city had known about these zoning contradictions for years, it had done nothing to fix them. The plan, I learned, was to deal with them in a complete overhaul of the Ferndale zoning map.
I eventually found a different buyer for my house, only after losing a few thousand dollars in extra mortgage payments.
This complex tale has a simple moral: While my love for all things Detroit is unabated, I will never purchase a property in Ferndale again.
James Rosen is a former political and Pentagon reporter who earlier covered the collapse of the Soviet Union as a Moscow correspondent.
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