END TO END: A recreational trail from Detroit to the Wisconsin border won’t be the same along its full length. Urban sections will likely look like – or include – the Dequindre Cut trail through Detroit, top, while Upper Peninsula portions may encompass parts of the North Country Trail, below, which is closed to bicycles. […]
Nancy Derringer
Nancy Nall Derringer is a former reporter at Bridge
Posted inQuality of Life
Michigan Piracy Postcard: How scrappers stole a church congregation’s dream
Keith Hill had a dream for his church. Befitting a congregation of only 20 families, it wasn’t a big dream, but it was theirs – to find a permanent home for both the church and a ministry they hoped to start, providing job training for young people of the nearby neighborhoods of Brightmoor and Grandmont Rosedale […]
Posted inMichigan Government
Auto rates drive voters into hiding
Alok Sharma analyzes data for a living. In 2010, he had a client, a politician, who was running for office and wanted to know if it was worth his time to campaign door-to-door in Detroit’s high-rise apartment buildings. Sharma thought the answer might be found by running a high-rise address through the Qualified Voter File, […]
Posted inTalent & Education
School Quality: Detroit’s other big results due tomorrow
Editor’s note: The Excellent Schools Detroit scorecard is now viewable online. Schools being schools, there’s no shortage of measurements to track their progress and quality. Actually finding useful information in that sea of data? That’s something else entirely. Tomorrow, Excellent Schools Detroit will roll out the result of two years of work – a comprehensive, […]
Posted inQuality of Life
Metal pirates strip too much of what’s left from Michigan cities, lawmakers grope for answers
TRASHED: The pastor of a Detroit church hoped to convert the closed Vetal Elementary School in Detroit into a career training center. However, once scrappers gained entrance to the building, they quickly made it unusable. This bathroom’s damage is typical. (Bridge photos by Nancy Derringer) When it comes to scrap-metal theft in Detroit and other […]
Posted inBusiness Watch
Capsized by economy, Houghton Lake clings to hopeful signs on vacationers
UP, DOWN: Randy Krause invested in Houghton Lake’s vacation economy by buying a small hotel. He eventually lost his investment. “Weekends were busy, but that was all,” he said. (Bridge photo/Nancy Derringer) PRUDENVILLE – Whether Randy Krause’s business was the victim of hard times, changing tastes or just plain bad luck hardly matters now. The […]
Posted inBusiness Watch
Once a gem, African-American resort community seeks new identity
TOP ATTRACTIONS: The resort community of Idlewild once attracted some of the nation’s top entertainment acts when it served as a mecca for African-American families in a segregated America. (Bridge photo/Nancy Derringer) IDLEWILD – Emma Jean Clark’s view from the front room of her family’s summer cottage is similar to that enjoyed by thousands […]
Posted inMichigan Government
West Michigan veteran challenged by neuron disease, VA bureaucracy that’s supposed to help him
FRUSTRATED BY DELAYS: Joel Smith shows some of the paperwork he has collected while trying to get assistance from the Department of Veterans Affairs for medical conditions he links to his service overseas. (Bridge photo/Lance Wynn) ADA – Joel Smith’s tangle with the VA bureaucracy is the stuff of which nightmares are made. A retired […]
Posted inTalent & Education
Mix school choice, state incentives and you get a $400,000 high-schooler
In Birmingham, the school district got $440,000 for one out-of-town high-schooler. In nearby Novi, the schools received $320,000 for an empty desk. That’s what you get when you mix a governor’s reform agenda with schools threading the needle between school choice and protesting parents. The two districts in Oakland County had long opted out of […]
Posted inTalent & Education
Schoolchildren shuttle across SE Michigan, raising questions about funding, community identity
Oak Park Schools might want to rebrand itself as Grand Central Station. Each morning in the school year that just ended, 2,121 students from outside Oak Park traveled into the district for their education, filling 48 percent of the desks. Each morning, 1,004 young Oak Park residents — about a third of the community’s home-grown […]