Built in 1920, the brick warehouse at 4444 Second Avenue in Detroit used to be a showroom for the city’s pride: Model T-based automobiles. Now it’s a metaphor for urban reinvention. Last fall, the building reopened as the Green Garage, a living laboratory and co-working space for the what its owners, Tom and Peggy Brennan, see as the future of Motown — triple-bottom-line sustainable enterprises that define success by social and environmental measures as well as by financial profit.
Not everyone can envision a future in this place. Even as the post bailout auto industry shows signs of life, Detroit’s landscape, with its derelict skyscrapers, abandoned homes and shrinking population, has become a potent symbol of economic collapse. But the Brennans see the potential for new growth here. Though Detroit already has several business incubators, the Green Garage, they say, will walk a different path.
Mr. Brennan says he believes that traditional incubator and accelerator programs extrude entrepreneurs through a mechanized, one-size-fits-all process, sometimes spurring founders to charge ahead without first finding clarity on what they want to do, or why. Instead of focusing on acceleration, he’s working to build a start-up culture that’s a rough analogue of the slow-food movement: intimate, deliberate, unhurried. It’s an organic approach he knows won’t be for everyone.