Reader (and Streetlight Detroit newsletter contributor extraordinaire ) Alex Klaus asked The Dig what we knew about an apartment building at 545 W. Grand Blvd. in Southwest Detroit that she had been curious about. We haven’t found much about that particular building (yet), but the research did remind us of the incredible beauty of the city’s historic apartment buildings.
Detroit has been famously oriented around the single-family home . As Francis Grunow put it in Model D, we likely had more of those homes “than anyplace else on earth” at one time. Census figures put only 18% of the city’s occupied housing units as apartment buildings with five or more apartments. Atlanta, by comparison, has 51% of the same kind of apartment buildings.
Lest you think, as I did, that the proliferation of single-family homes in Detroit was a post-war phenomenon, let me direct you to a startling statistic: The peak of the building boom in Detroit was 1925 , when there were 11,951 permits issued for new single-family homes. In May of last year there were 57 permits issued for single-family homes in all of Wayne County .