Detroit Employee Relocation

A story about Dan Gilbert's commitment to revitalizing Detroit by moving his company downtown during the city's financial crisis.

"During the financial crisis, Detroit went bankrupt. Meanwhile, I'm super rich and living out in the suburbs, and I said 'fuck it, we're moving back into Detroit.' We moved our entire team into Detroit - 4,000 employees. We literally bought this huge building in Campus Martius, right in the center of downtown, and moved everyone there.

I said for my own employees and for the city, we're just going to fix it. We built casinos, built a private security firm - if you walk around there's normal police and then there's Dan's police. I bought billions of dollars of derelict buildings. You go there and there's skyscrapers - it's like going to Chicago and I own the Sears Tower and this and this. I basically own 20-30% of downtown Detroit.

We just announced we're going to pay off $300 million of property taxes for Detroit residents. This guy really cares about Detroit, and since then, it's become the largest independent mortgage business in the United States."