Michigan and Wisconsin have been tussling over the use of the term “mitten” to describe geography. Michigan long has explained its shape (at least for the Lower Peninsula) as a mitten. Wisconsin recently decided it liked the mitten idea and started promoting the idea on its TravelWisconsin site. In no surprise, plenty of Michiganians find […]
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
Kalamazoo gains strength from Promise
Jasmine Granville learned about the Kalamazoo Promise riding the bus back from a basketball game at Battle Creek Central. “I don’t remember if they played it on the radio, or people were calling people,” she said. “I remember a bunch of the seniors were just bawling their eyes out.” As a freshman at Kalamazoo Central […]
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State effort to replicate Promise yields mixed results
The Kalamazoo Promise has inspired 10 Michigan communities to develop college promises of their own — without relying on a few generous benefactors to underwrite the whole thing. The communities, mostly distressed urban areas, are creating Promise Zones, with the goal of promising all high school graduates living within the school district boundaries financial support […]
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Promise helps Kalamazoo weather tough times
For a decade, Michigan’s economic dashboard has flashed red: high unemployment, record foreclosures, bankrupt automakers, population declines. And the Kalamazoo region hasn’t been spared from the pain that spread across Michigan. But leaders and families in Kalamazoo are hopeful that the start of the 21st century will mostly be remembered for the birth, in 2005, […]
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Value of universities exemplified by new hospitals
The other day, my wife Kathy and I went to have a look through the new, soon-to-open University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s and Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospitals. The hospitals, located on the south side of the U of M medical system’s campus, have been under construction for the last four years. (The women’s hospital […]
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The costs of that "$500 house" in Detroit
A year ago, Jerry Paffendorf showed a friend from New York City how a house was up for sale in Detroit’s North Corktown neighborhood via a tax foreclosure auction. That friend fell in love withDetroit, the neighborhood and the house and bought it online for just a few thousand dollars, less than a few months’ […]
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Mining boom roils Upper Peninsula
Ron and Carol Henriksen retired to the kind of place most people can only imagine — a riverfront house in an area of the Western Upper Peninsula that is so serene, the dominant sound is often the whisk of trees rustling in the wind. After living in suburband Chicago for three decades, in the path […]
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Is state losing its love of fish?
Longtime fly fisherman Robert Thorsen enjoys solitary fishing experiences, but the suburban Detroit resident fears he and other anglers may be enjoying too much of a good thing. “I see a lot of stretches of rivers that are deserted,” Thorsen said. “As a fisherman, I don’t mind if there are fewer people on the water […]
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Detroit is, indeed, 'rising'
For the longest time, I have opened my morning paper only to find some negative articles about the city of Detroit. Indeed, these bearers of bad news heralded the city as the fattest, the angriest, the most crime-ridden, and, yes, even the city with the most STDs. My morning ritual of reading the negative press […]
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How do you hold on to the hipsters?
The biggest danger to the revitalization of Detroit’s Midtown — and, by extension, the city itself — doesn’t pack a gun or wield foreclosure papers. He wears a backpack and chews bubble gum. Children — and their parents’ perceptions about local schools — will determine whether the young professionals now streaming into Midtown stay in […]
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