Dan Gilbert, Home Depot to rehab 65 Detroit homes

It looks as if Dan Gilbert is moving his efforts at Detroit’s revitalization deeper into the city’s long-neglected neighborhoods.

Gilbert’s Quicken Loans will partner with Home Depot on a bid to help boost neighborhood home values, Mayor Mike Duggan told members of the city-state Financial Review Commission today at the monthly meeting of the board that oversees Detroit’s finances under terms of the city’s exit from Chapter 9 bankruptcy last December.

“They’re actually renovating 65 houses in Detroit,” Duggan said of the two companies. “They’re going to renovate them first and sell them to raise the comps (comparable home sales amounts in nearby neighborhoods), because once you get the comps up the appraisals come up. So they’re attacking it that way.”

Duggan was outlining his administration’s strategy at addressing the city’s huge blight problem and the challenges Detroit has faced in getting salvageable homes in the hands of people who want to renovate and live in them. Among the challenges: banks unwilling to write mortgages in Detroit because of the city’s deeply depressed property values and the need for mortgages to include money for renovation.

Duggan appeared to have let the news slip out ahead of an official announcement. His office and the Detroit Land Bank Authority declined to comment this afternoon. Representatives for Home Depot had no immediate comment, and Quicken Loans representatives couldn't be reached. It wasn't immediately clear whether the project would be a partnership of Quicken or Gilbert's Bedrock Development.

Duggan didn’t say which neighborhoods are being targeted by the two companies, but the city’s effort to stabilize neighborhoods and reverse blight has generally focused on preserving stronger neighborhoods, clearing blight and auctioning abandoned homes there to encourage people to move back in. The neighborhoods include Marygrove, East English Village, West Village, Boston-Edison, Virginia Park and southwest Detroit.

The home renovations could also begin to address criticism that Detroit’s revitalization has favored downtown and Midtown and not the city’s other working-class neighborhoods hit hard by unemployment, the recession and the foreclosure crisis.

A report in July by the Detroit News said Quicken Loans was not a major player in the massive number of foreclosures in Detroit but nonetheless played a role in homes lost to foreclosure that later became blighted. Gilbert criticized the report and issued a rebuttal, saying the mortgages Quicken issued were above board, responsible loans to qualified buyers.

Gilbert’s Bedrock Development also is principal developer of a $70-million project to build 337 units of new housing in Detroit’s largely vacant Brush Park neighborhood in a high-density combination of row houses and apartment buildings along with retail.

Contact Matt Helms: 313-222-1450 or mhelms@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @matthelms.