Part of the difficulty was they didn t know what hook to hang our request on. they re used to developers saying i want to build a strip mall or i want to build a parking structure. but they re not used to people saying we want land to build a model organic farm. malik yakini started growing the farm with the goal providing greater access to fresh produce in areas that grocery stores have completely abandoned. that s basically all of detroit s inner city. other than whole foods, who just came in, yes. not a single national food chain. no. no. in 2007 farmer jack closed his last stores in detroit. and that was kind of the end of the big chains in detroit. this is subsistence farming, not cash crop. you re not going to be anticipating selling outside of detroit. there s greater demand in detroit than all of the locally farmers can supply. so, first we want to supply that local demand in the city of detroit. to what degree do you think this model can be replicated in and arou
How come? i would agree. george azar is our detroit fixer. he s been coming here with his friends joe for years. this is what makes it right here, this. cortido. cortido. cortido, it s pickled slaw. salsa. i ll do this, but i don t know if you re up to this one. what are you sayin ? i don t know if you can hang, man. is it a manly thing? it s turning into it, it seems like. [laughs] mexican, spicy. salvadorian, not spicy. that s true though. they don t do it that spicy. wow. chicharone? mm-hm. yeah this is porky goodness, that s for sure. chicharone is fried pork. it s fried pork, ground with peppers, onion, and tomato. simple. taking the liberty of ordering some indegenous detroit beverages that we ve overlooked so far. now, vernors, which i haven t had. it s like a cross between ginger beer and ginger ale. it s like, not a spicy as ginger beer, and not as sweet as ginger ale. it s in the middle. it s my favorite beverage in the city. i need
What was this part of the factory? where are we standing? this right here is where the assembly line was. this is a paint booth where they spray paint the cars. you can see on the floor where they have the uh, to wash away the over-spray. the assembly line ended 35, 40 feet over here. there s bridges here between here and the main building. and the assembly line actually came across the bridges. you re looking at a possibility of an assembly line about three quarters of a mile long. you re talking hundreds if not thousands of people all working on the process. this is sort of a it s not a perfect model for detroit, but a perfect model of when a big factory goes down, it s not just 33,000 people. that s 33,000 families who are going to be eating dinner out less. you ve got a point there on that. most people i would guess have no idea what a packard even was. we re talking about one of the great luxury cars in the world, yes? yeah, it was the kind of car that everybody ah,
When it s at the point that it s actually considering selling what s left of itself in chunks. in detroit, city services are reduced or cut out completely. fewer buses, fewer cops, fewer firefighters. answer: they turn to each other for help. or figure out how to do it for themselves. detroit has a reputation as a tough town, but that toughness is about resilience, too. the insistence on sticking with it, no matter what. on not giving up in the face of the utter failure of leadership year after year. if the city abandons its parks and leaves them to become overgrown and eaten, like so much of the city by tall grass and weeds, then somebody has got to do something, right? meet the mower gang. started by this guy, tom nardone, with a simple mission of doing what they can to keep detroit s abandonded parks maintained. who are you guys and what are you doing here? we re the detroit mower gang.
i can t give away my secret. will this kind of entrepreneurship lead detroit out of its sinkhole? probably not. i can t believe there s not a line of cars around the corner. that was good. but it s no longer about winning, is it? it s about surviving.