Plant, a derelict, multi-block manufacturing facility, plans to begin turning it into a mixed-use development.

At Ponyride, an entrepreneurship hub in Corktown, a neighborhood just west of downtown, co-founder and serial entrepreneur Phil Cooley (who also owns Slows BBQ) has helped create a space that provides low rents to social entrepreneurs, a "space for Detroiters to create their own narratives." Within a former foreclosed warehouse, he's helped build a community of businesses, from the Empowerment Plan, which employs formerly homeless women to make jackets, to Detroit Denim, one of only a handful of domestic jean manufacturers in the United States. It's considered a model of turning the foreclosure crisis on its head.

But just across the street sits a hulking, concrete beast, a massive, crumbling structure sitting vacant and unused.According to Cooley, the empty warehouse is the property of Matty Moroun, "Detroit's own Montgomery Burns," and a sad symbol of how some are holding the city back. "Pieces of the facade and razor wire keep falling off onto our property," says Cooley. "He keeps it empty like there's a waiting list to get in."

Moroun and his family are notorious for owning, and not developing, nearby Michigan Central Station, the city's equivalent to Grand Central, which has been sitting undeveloped for decades (the Morouns just added new windows after the city plied them with a deal that promised additional land for development). Held up as the poster children for greedy, out-of-town developers, the Morouns, who live in expensive suburbans homes north of the city, are emblematic, perhaps, of