Rufus Bartell, who was sometimes called the Avenue of Fashion’s mayor and even its Dan Gilbert, owns a corner clothing store there. “Simply Casual is a lifestyle store catering to people who work hard and play hard and making their transition between the two smooth,” he told me. At 49, Bartell, wearing an ascot and sleek Puma sneakers, made it plain that he was a man who wouldn’t be outworked or outplayed. Like just about everything in Detroit, his store is a former something — Grinnell Brothers pianos, back when the wives of auto executives strolled the avenue’s high-end shops, and later a cleaners. He believed that the once-thrumming Motor City was more a land of opportunity today than it was at any moment in his lifetime. For the first time in eight years, sales at his store were picking up. With his nephew, a recently retired N.F.L. cornerback, Bartell is also opening a chicken-and-waffle restaurant on the Avenue of Fashion. And alone or with other partners, he has bought five vacant storefronts there, some 40,000 square feet. He is confident that he can fill it all with retail.

Bartell always juggles a number of enterprises, he told me, purposefully keeping his portfolio diverse. He has also involved himself in the larger enterprise of civic development. “That’s how you graduate from being a business owner to a business leader, and it’s why I admire Dan Gilbert,” he said. Bartell serves on the advisory boards of Detroit Future City, the Michigan Garment Council and a nonprofit organization that funds Detroiters who plan to open unique shops in their communities. On Livernois, he said, four new restaurants and six more stores are preparing to open in the next year or so, and the entire strip has the support of the nonprofit groups and their grant money. Just last month, after six years of considering it, he and a handful of other business owners paid for a billboard on the northern end of the corridor, advertising the revived Avenue of Fashion as a place to “Shop. Dine. Explore.” Most of all, Bartell feels confident that the pendulum has already begun to swing in Detroit’s favor. Along his half-mile of Livernois, there are 51 retailers doing $47.6 million in annual sales. The median household income in the surrounding residential blocks is $56,000, among the highest in the city. Although most of sparsely populated Detroit is seeing very little economic activity or likelihood of any to come, there are a half-dozen retail corridors like the Avenue of Fashion in the city. The business resource center D-Hive has graduated 350 Detroiters from its small-business classes in the last two years and has 100 people on its waiting list for coming sessions. According to the National League of Cities, Detroit was the fifth-ranked city in the U.S. in 2012 in terms of jobs per capita from start-ups, beating out San Jose, Calif. “Detroit is getting ready to hit momentum,” Bartell told me. “When you hit momentum, companies go from small to big.”

Bartell is an unrelenting proponent of the free market, and as he ran the weekly meeting of the Independent Business Association in one of his empty storefronts on a weekday morning, he kept the focus on the moneymaking possibilities in his city’s demise. Of the 20 small-business owners there, all but two of them were African-American. A retired civil engineer named Prema Qadir, who built websites and was looking to start a catering service, complained about the failure of city government to properly educate anyone. Bartell cut her short: “That sounds like an opportunity. Pose it in the form of an opportunity.” Someone else worried over the fate of Detroiters who have stuck it out in homes while all around them their neighborhoods turned to field and ash. “To grow Detroit,” Bartell pronounced, “you have to shrink it. There are opportunities with vacant land.” Buildings were going to be torn down, junk hauled off, land cleared. Those were all potential businesses. “If it was my grandmother living on a street with one house, ‘Sorry, Grandma, you got to move.’ ”

From behind Bartell, a woman who was shifting uncomfortably could no longer hold her tongue. She shouted, “I totally disagree, Rufus.”

“Of course you do. Socialist,” Bartell muttered.

The woman, Tenay Hankins, runs Biz to Biz Match, a service assisting small businesses with grants, contracts and partnerships. She and a couple of other women reminded those gathered that the city had a terrible track record of looking out for its residents, and that Detroiters, particularly blacks, had been ill served by state and local government, redlining lenders and high-rolling private investors. Just recently, blind faith in capitalism buried their neighborhoods under foreclosures and contributed heavily to the city’s bankruptcy. “Detroiters are not respected as far as the value and dollars they bring, the obstacles they’ve overcome to still be here. It’s always looked at as if we’re not instrumental,” Hankins said.

“The question is, what do you do after your skepticism,” Bartell responded, trying to get his meeting back on track. “Every city on the globe, there are things that government hasn’t done correctly. You got to have a plan. Detroit is being rebuilt with or without everybody at this table.”

In Corktown, a former Irish enclave bordering downtown, Phillip Cooley, like Gilbert, is a businessman often described as doing well by doing good. “Gilbert is way better at it,” Cooley told me. “I wish I was doing well. I have a negative bank account.” Nine years ago, Cooley opened Slows Bar BQ there, next to a pawnshop and a bar called LJ’s Lounge that kept irregular hours. As Slows turned into a destination, its success drawing a second wave of settlement, Cooley looked into other local economic development. A relentlessly positive 36-year-old, he still drinks and shoots pool at LJ’s, but he and his partners recently bought the pawnshop and are in the process of converting it into a restaurant with six rental apartments above it. The new chef worked at restaurants in Las Vegas, but he grew up in the Detroit area and contacted Cooley in hopes of contributing to the revival of the city.