They’ve been a fixture of city-limit signs for generations: Under the one that welcomes you to the community, two or three service-club logos and exhortations to join the Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions or Jaycees at their regular breakfast or lunch meetings. Service clubs are many things, but exclusive isn’t one of them. Once the barriers to […]
Quality of Life
Michigan is a great place to live. Bridge will report that fact often — and on potential threats to the assets that make it so.
Posted inQuality of Life
Iraqi immigrants flow into Michigan, but state lags in attracting new residents
While the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has yet to issue their 2012 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, they have just released 2012 tables on the number of persons obtaining legal permanent resident status (also known as “green card” holders) by state and major metropolitan area. Immigrant numbers dropped by 2.9 percent nationally, from 1,062,040 in […]
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Far from bankrupt: Michigan art museums thrive despite economic woes
To hear John Henry, director of the Flint Institute of Arts, tell it, there once existed a near-magical time in that city’s history, when its blue-collar roots lived in harmony with a yearning for beauty and creativity somewhere off the assembly line. That was the era when Charles Stewart Mott, the city’s two-time mayor and […]
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Why go? A peek inside some of the state’s best art museums
With the end of a summer approaching, Michigan tourists may be looking for more indoor destinations in fall. The state’s art museums welcome hundreds of thousands of visitors in a year, with collections and programming that vary widely. A few possibilities are: Detroit Institute of Arts Michigan’s largest, located on Woodward Avenue in the city’s […]
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Homeless in Detroit: Deep in the trenches of poverty
Ericka Murria was 17-years-old when she first went to Coalition on Temporary Shelter with her one-year-old daughter. Murria, a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault, she lived on hard times after her mother passed away. She’d been living with friends who were into drugs and alcohol. But after her friends stole her Bridge card […]
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Cutting a new trail for the Pure Michigan economy
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. […]
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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 […]
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Black males in Michigan die at an alarming rate
CLICK to enlarge While Michigan may be aging faster than any other state, our overall death numbers are not growing. Provisional death totals for 2011, just released by Michigan’s Department of Community Health, show that the total number of deaths in Michigan fell by 313 between 2010 and 2011. If we were to look at […]
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Michigan policymakers work on climate change – even as some avoid the term
Has global warming cooled off as an issue in Michigan? Just looking at how it is, or is not, dealt with by state leaders, one could guess it is in a deep freeze. It is not discussed daily among lawmakers and policymakers, at least not publicly. The closest the Legislature has to any legislation dealing with […]
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VIDEO Q & A: Visions of Michigan's warmer future
What will Michigan’s climate look and feel like decades from now? A Michigan State University climatologist offers his predictions.