A Loveland Premonition; Another Great Article about Reimagining Micro-Ownership & Detroit

Crazy Company Presents A LOVELAND Premonition from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

It's been a well-deserved, very good week for Mr. Jerry Paffendorf.

Michael Byrne has an impressive new article up on Motherboard about Loveland as a tool for reimagining, redeveloping, reconceiving Detroit. (As some readers may know, Rita J. King is the largest "inchvestor" in Jerry's new Detroit-based experiment in micro-ownership of real estate project, Loveland. Rita's inches are in development in the Plymouth colony, which is featured in the above video.)

On how the project is perceived in Detroit:

Sometimes people are like ‘what is this doing to save Detroit?’ Really extreme stuff. There is this situation, and people are trying to make their own part of the city and the city in general better. I feel that if there is hard work, new thinking, and just general creativity, you can do positive things without having it explicitly be, like, all of the money is going to some particular charity, or something.

I want awesome, positive, creative things to happen in this city, but it’s not entirely what drives me. [And] I don’t necessarily feel that efforts that are specifically targeted at helping out little pieces always have the biggest impact on making things better.

I don’t think I’m making light of anything here at all. It’s working on top of circumstances that allow wild new land use. There’s the creative conditions to do this here, where there certainly isn’t in most other places. It’s unique that Detroit is built on circumstances that are not ideal. People have asked why I don’t set this up as a non-profit. I’ve worked in non-profits as well, and I know how they’re set up. And they’re awesome. But I prefer the freedom of a for-profit company. I think that if you make stuff fun and new and exciting and you get that energy going, I feel like that can have just as positive an impact, and even more so sometimes.

The article is one of the most in-depth and perceptive stories to date about this project.

[Loveland is Rebuilding Detroit Through the Internet, One Square Inch at a Time.]