hotfudgedetroit.com

"I was like, 'Wow, this is really nice,' and my parents were like, 'You'd be foolish if you didn't move in here,' " said Bernardelli, who until recently worked at Quicken Loans downtown and is now in the insurance industry. "I was making excellent money over at Quicken, so $1,600 was really just a throw in the bucket."

jmy wrote:

"I was like, 'Wow, this is really nice,' and my parents were like, 'You'd be foolish if you didn't move in here,' " said Bernardelli, who until recently worked at Quicken Loans downtown and is now in the insurance industry. "I was making excellent money over at Quicken, so $1,600 was really just a throw in the bucket."

How much are 25-year-olds making at Quicken???

guest wrote:People continue to walk away from or get their units foreclosed on in my building. A woman who had another unit on a different floor bought an apartment down the hall on my floor for her sons to live in. Someone bought that at auction and an eviction notice went up on the door last month. Today there's a foreclosure notice on the apartment next door to that one. This is crazy. The woman was in her 80's, had reportedly been in there a long time but she refinanced in January 20014. They gave her over $214,000. There's no way that place was worth as much as a third of that. And then she died a month after the refinance and the place was in limbo since then until now. The icing on the cake is that the originator of that loan flipped it to another finance company but kind of forgot to mention that the woman was dead and nobody was paying on it. I thought they stopped doing this schitt after the mortgage meltdown years ago, but apparently it's business as usual. Craziness. Meanwhile, people are paying stupid amounts of money to buy closet-sized spaces in Midtown. I guarantee that my building is exponentially nicer than anything there, but it's not in the hipster district and the values languish.

Limp Bizkit Guitarist And Rock Singer Fiance Move To Detroit, Put Their Money Where Their Mouth Is

DETROIT (CBS Detroit) New York, Minneapolis, Denver and Oregon were runners up on the short list of places for Carré Callaway and Wes Borland to start the next phase of their lives.

They were sold on Detroit after spending one day here.

Temporarily crashing in Troy, the two were preparing for the big move on Thursday to an ornate three story home in Detroit’s Arden Park-East Boston neighborhood.

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2015/07/30/ ... -mouth-is/

Tea Bag wrote:

Limp Bizkit Guitarist And Rock Singer Fiance Move To Detroit, Put Their Money Where Their Mouth Is

DETROIT (CBS Detroit) New York, Minneapolis, Denver and Oregon were runners up on the short list of places for Carré Callaway and Wes Borland to start the next phase of their lives.

They were sold on Detroit after spending one day here.

Temporarily crashing in Troy, the two were preparing for the big move on Thursday to an ornate three story home in Detroit’s Arden Park-East Boston neighborhood.

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2015/07/30/ ... -mouth-is/

Isn't this the guy whose band is largely credited with killing the rock n' roll genre?

Tea Bag wrote:

Limp Bizkit Guitarist And Rock Singer Fiance Move To Detroit, Put Their Money Where Their Mouth Is

DETROIT (CBS Detroit) New York, Minneapolis, Denver and Oregon were runners up on the short list of places for Carré Callaway and Wes Borland to start the next phase of their lives.

They were sold on Detroit after spending one day here.

Temporarily crashing in Troy, the two were preparing for the big move on Thursday to an ornate three story home in Detroit’s Arden Park-East Boston neighborhood.

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2015/07/30/ ... -mouth-is/

Isn't this the guy whose band is largely credited with killing the rock n' roll genre?

Mud Bug wrote:
BTW- Limp Bizkit is a horrible band, and they (and their lame contemporaries) shit the bed so bad in the late 90s and early 00s that rock music will never fully recover. What a dreadful collective it was: Limp Bizkit, Korn, Marilyn Manson, Smashing Pumpkins. The next sub-generation was even worse- Puddle of Mudd, Trappt, Staind, etc. And don't even get me started on Creed and Nickelback.

What do all these bands now have in common today? Total Irrelevancy.

Doctor Detroit wrote:I feel like Smashing Pumpkins is completely out of place in this line up. For one, their hay day was circa 1993, nearly a decade before the rest of these bands.

16 Years Ago: Woodstock ’99 Goes Down in Flames

By Jeff Giles
July 22, 2015

“This is not the real Woodstock. They messed up. They messed up the whole name of Woodstock.”

Volumes have been written about the disaster that was Woodstock ’99, but if you’re looking for a succinct appraisal of the infamous festival that started out as a 30th anniversary celebration of a watershed moment in American pop culture and ended in blazing riots, the above quote — taken from an Associated Press report filed as the sun rose on the final night’s smoldering wreckage — is pretty solidly on target. Sadly, anyone who’d been paying attention could have seen it coming.

Part of the problem stemmed from motivation. Promoter John Scher, who’d lost money on the Woodstock ’94 festival held five years previous, was determined not to repeat past mistakes. As he told reporters, “You can have a Woodstock, and it can be a safe and secure environment. We’re going to try and make a profit on this one.” To that end, Woodstock ’99 was moved to moved to Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, N.Y. — a questionable decision not only because it lies hundreds of miles from the original Woodstock, but because the grounds were once toxic enough to qualify for EPA Superfund site status. Even more problematic was the fact that trees on the site had been cleared out to increase safety on the landing strips, thus removing any natural shade spots — and given that Woodstock ’99 was scheduled for the weekend of July 22–25, 1999, when temperatures soared over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, concertgoers found themselves coping with sweltering heat.

As it turned out, heat was only one of the potentially dangerous environmental factors that concertgoers were forced to deal with. According to David Moodie and Maureen Callahan’s damning postmortem for Spin, the promoters cut corners just about anywhere they could, including skimping on plumbing for vendors and installing an alarmingly low number of toilets and showers (which were then situated in the worst possible height and distance from the campgrounds).

Staffing was also a major problem. Moodie and Callahan describe an environment in which low-paid workers, denied water or regular meals, simply walked off the job partway through the festival, leaving trash bins to overflow and letting attendees get away with a long list of alleged abuses that included theft, sexual assault and rampant, inappropriate pooping.

Adding to the negative energy building over the weekend were the outrageous prices for everything, starting with the $150 it cost for a ticket and continuing through inflated charges for beer ($5), personal pizzas ($12), burritos ($10), bottled water ($4), and bags of ice ($15). As Los Lobos member Steve Berlin, who performed at the festival, later observed, “This is the first generation that’s been branded their whole lives. They’ve been identified as a market opportunity since they took their first breath. And when you take those people and tell them this is going to be culturally and historically important and it turns out to be another commercial, I’d probably get pretty pissed off too.”

That anger was reflected in a substantial portion of the Woodstock ’99 lineup, which included such linchpins of the ascendant nu-metal movement as Limp Bizkit and Korn — both of whom were later lambasted in the press for contributing to (and, in the case of Bizkit frontman Fred Durst, allegedly actively encouraging) a violent atmosphere. Durst seemed to be hoping for some sort of organized, victimless aggression from the crowd during Limp Bizkit’s set, telling the audience, “People are getting hurt. Don’t let anybody get hurt. But I don’t think you should mellow out. That’s what Alanis Morissette had you motherf—ers do. If someone falls, pick ‘em up. We already let the negative energy out. Now we wanna let out the positive energy.”

Unfortunately, very little positive energy was reported at the scene. MTV anchor Kurt Loder later described the festival’s final day as “dangerous to be around” and “scary,” saying, “There were just waves of hatred bouncing around the place. It was clear we had to get out of there.”

Durst disagreed, however. “I didn’t see anybody getting hurt,” he said. “You don’t see that. When you’re looking out on a sea of people and the stage is 20 feet in the air and you’re performing and you’re feeling your music, how do they expect us to see anything bad going on?”

Not that Durst was trying to claim bad stuff didn’t go down at Woodstock ’99 — just that it wasn’t his fault. “Woodstock was about making some money and getting it in the quickest, easiest way they could get it on and down and done,” he pointed out. “A lot of people were hurt. A lot of people were scarred for life.”

The worst of it went down during the Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ festival-closing set, which took place after a peace-promoting group called Pax handed out candles meant to be lit as a sort of mass statement during the Peppers’ performance of “Under the Bridge.” They were lit, all right — just not in the way anyone intended.
By the time the band reached its closing number, a horrifically, unintentionally ironic cover of Jimi Hendrix‘s “Fire,” the candles had been used to torch everything from the mountains of garbage to sections of the plywood “Peace Fence” erected to keep non-ticketholders from entering, and crowds ran riot over the festival grounds, looting ATMs and destroying vendor tents. When it was all said and done, the law enforcement numbers for Woodstock ’99 were terribly grim: 44 arrests, 10,000 people seeking medical treatment, and eight reported rapes.

If Scher and his fellow promoters had ever entertained any hopes of a follow-up, they’d been firmly dashed by the morning of July 26, as cleanup crews worked to undo the damage and pundits raised a disapproving chorus. Fifteen years on, that chorus continues.

Guitarist Tom Morello, who performed with Rage Against the Machine after Limp Bizkit’s set, initially complained that much of the press coverage of the event was “grossly unfair and youth-bashing and tried to vilify an entire generation because of a couple of idiots there.” More recently, however, he seems to have adopted a harsher viewpoint, summing up the whole mess by saying, “For me, Woodstock ’99 was the low point of nu metal. The rapes in the pit, the trashing of the sites. It just seemed like it distilled the worst elements of metal — the misogynist jock buggery — and the message wasn’t announced as ‘This is a horrible thing.’ It was more like, ‘This is our new Woodstock generation — [a] bunch of idiots.’”

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/woodstock-99-riots/

Buyer seeks $200M redevelopment of Lee Plaza

The abandoned 17-story Lee Plaza Residential Hotel will be renovated into a building boasting around 200 units of luxury, market-rate apartments slated to open in fall 2017, according to buyer and Detroit native Craig Sasser.

The $200 million project will include redevelopments to two adjacent lots as well as the addition of moderate, low and very low-income housing, said Sasser, 63-year-old managing member and CEO of Moneta Energy, LLC.

“It does take every layer to build a village,” he said.

Sasser detailed the project during the 11th annual Breakfast of the Boulevard for the West Grand Boulevard Collaborative organization.

“Development has always been in my heart,” said Sasser, adding that his 88-year-old mother has been involved in around $5 billion worth of redevelopment projects nationwide. “When you see a good project, you know it.”

The Lee Plaza closed in 1993 and has fallen into disrepair since, Sasser said.

“This is a symbol of the shame and decline of what we as citizens have allowed to happen to our city,” Sasser said. “We can’t blame others. We are the solution.”

The hotel has been stripped to the studs but remains standing on a solid foundation of concrete and steel, he said.

“We don’t have to build from the ground up,” Sasser said. “It’s totally sound.”

It also is located in a developer’s dream spot.

“In real estate, it’s location, location, location,” Sasser said. “This is right next to the booming areas of Detroit. Downtown and Midtown are minutes away.”

Sasser and his company are in the process of purchasing the building for $258,000 from the Detroit Housing Commission, he said. The sale should be completed next month.

“We can confirm we are finalizing the sale of the historic Lee Plaza Building to Craig Sasser,” commission executive director Kelley Lyons said Thursday. “The property currently is under historic review by the State Historic Preservation Office of the Michigan State Housing Development Authority. We anticipate closing on the transaction next month.”

Lyons also said her organization supports Sasser’s plans to revitalize areas surrounding the hotel.

“We are excited by Craig’s plans for the building, as well as his commitment to neighborhood involvement in the process,” she said.

The building renovation will cost around $34 million, with another $50 million earmarked for adjacent lots. In total, approximately $200 million is expected to be spent redeveloping the hotel and surrounding area, Sasser said.

“One large energy investor” has committed to the entire bill, Sasser said.

Sasser said he is committed to hiring local workers for the project, including ex-Navy SEAL veterans for security during construction as well as students from nearby Northwestern High School.

“You have to be creative about working with our community,” Sasser said. “We want to start that list (of prospective employees) right now.”

Work on the project will begin in January with cleaning crews sweeping through the building, he said. Completed apartments are expected to retail for $1.75 to $2 per square foot, and will feature state-of-the-art technology including electronic artwork and music geared toward the individual resident.

“I’m aiming at people that are into all the toys,” he said. “This is going to be a ‘smart’ building.”

Detroit-based architect firm Hamilton Anderson Associates is working on renderings of the renovated Lee Plaza as well as an adjacent parking structure to feature a rooftop pool during the summer and skating rink in the winter, Sasser said. Meanwhile, Rossetti has been tapped to design an outdoor public gathering space near the old hotel.

WGBC president and co-found Mildred Hunt Robbins praised the development plans in a statement released prior to Thursday’s breakfast.

“The families in the WGBC area welcome news of the redevelopment of the 17-story Lee Plaza icon, a jewel in the City of Detroit, which was in jeopardy of being lost by years of neglect and vandalism,” Robbins said.

“WGBC is especially pleased that the project is being undertaken by a developer who understands the importance of sustainable development, as demonstrated by plans for a zero-energy building, and also the importance of community engagement and collaboration, as demonstrated by relationships now being forged with the WGBC and other community stakeholders.”

The historic Charles Noble building at 2240 W. Grand Blvd. was constructed in 1929 and added to the United States Register of Historic Sites on Nov. 5, 1981, organizers said. It also is registered with the State of Michigan as a Historic Site.

“This project has been adopted by the National Trust for Historic Preservations,” Sasser said. “This is going to be their model for how we can make these old buildings energy efficient.”

Sasser said the renovation coincides with Detroit’s motto.

“It will rise from the ashes,” Sasser said. “I believe that. I believe it is the time.”

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2015/11/19/lee-plaza-hotel-redeveloped/76038068/