It seems every new restaurant, bar, or national retail chain opening in Detroit generates excitement in the wake of the city's bankruptcy. Most are owned or operated by white people. But Detroit has many black-owned businesses that survived the worst...
When the housing crisis hit in the mid-2000s, millions lost their jobs. Licensed home builder and Saginaw resident Jeff Little was one of them. Jeff lost his job in 2006, and soon his wife was unemployed as well. Struggling to make ends meet every mo...
How do we break the cycle of poverty? What can we, as a state and a nation, do to help poor children escape poverty and move up and out? Jamie Fogel is a pre-doctoral fellow with Harvard's department of economics and a researcher on the Quality of Op...
Small-town movie theaters are in a fight for their lives. Hollywood studios are phasing out 35-millimeter film in favor of going digital. This means theaters are feeling the pressure to spend thousands of dollars to upgrade their facilities, or be fo...
Thousands of Detroit and Wayne County homeowners face tax foreclosures. Some of those families still have time to save their homes, but they might be paying more in taxes than they should have had to pay. Cheryl West has been living in her home for 6...
You might have heard of Camp Take Notice, the tent city in Ann Arbor that was forced to close nearly three years ago. Viviana Pernot has made a short documentary film about that homeless community and the non-profit group that helps them. Pernot's sh...
Time to break out the long pants: tick season is back! The past couple of years we've had a tick boom along the west side of the state and it's happening again this year. Rich Keith spends a lot of time with ticks. He's the director of the Kalamazoo...
This week, the Detroit Regional Chamber's annual Mackinac Policy Conference gets underway on Mackinac Island. This is when Lansing, political Lansing at least, empties out of town and heads north to rub shoulders and click cocktail glasses with Michi...
This weekend, the electronic musical festival called Movement will bring in more than 100,000 people from around the globe to the birthplace of techno: Detroit. Techno is actually a much bigger deal in Europe than it is here. A lot of Detroit techno...
With a nod to Billy Joel, the Grand Rapids Art Museum is in a New York State of Mind these days. That's thanks to a special exhibition running this summer. T.J. Wilcox: In The Air is a multi-media celebration of the Big Apple's skyline by artist T.J....