WORKING TOGETHER - What can we accomplish?

Please read the following Crain's Detroit article about what working together is doing for the Grand Rapids area.  Think what WE COULD DO if we all worked together!

I'm still amazed when I meet people who think in negative terms of scarcity and won't share for fear of losing something.  Thinking in positive terms of abundance and believing there's enough to go around if we work together to create it, is so much healthier!

Invite everyone you know in our area to this site so we can become a positive force of change!  Show up a meeting or two to share ideas and learn new concepts!

Learning from west side's story: GR has community strategy, access to cash, 'can-do' spirit

By Daniel Duggan

 GRAND RAPIDS - When busloads of Detroit-area real estate professionals went to Grand Rapids for a conference last week, the riders were confronted with something they haven't seen in a while.

Construction cranes.

Lots of them.

The Grand Rapids metro area has $1 billion of real estate development in various phases of construction. Condos are being built, a new medical research corridor is under development and industrial space is getting sold.

With all this in a down economy, there are lessons to be learned for the Detroit area, said the people who attended "West Side Story," the 2008 real estate forum put on by the Urban Land Institute and the University of Michigan. Crain's was a sponsor of the event, now in its 22nd year.

"The fact that these people took a furniture-manufacturing town and have turned it into a medical research corridor is both amazing and courageous," said Robin Boyle, an urban planning professor at Wayne State University and Birmingham planning commissioner who is co-chairman of ULI.

People in Detroit were well-served to see how people in the community have been working together to get real estate projects moving, Boyle said.

"There's a sense that people trust each other here," he said of Grand Rapids. "We need that same spirit of cooperation in Detroit."

Boyle and others were moved by a presentation by the three chairmen of the Grand Action Committee, a group that has been the driver behind the Van Andel Arena, the DeVos Place convention center, a renovated theater and the college of medicine now under construction.

West Michigan entrepreneur Dick DeVos teamed up with retired Old Kent Bank Chairman John Canepa and David Frey, former chairman of Grand Rapids' Union Bank & Trust Co., to form the leadership for the Grand Action Committee in the run-up to building the Van Andel Arena in 1996.

In total, the four projects included $393 million of investment, of which $109 million has been in the form of contributions from the private sector.

"We put the private money on the table before we even asked anyone from the public sector," DeVos said during a presentation at the forum. "We wanted to be able to go in saying, "We as a community think this is important.' "

Access to the kind of capital controlled by DeVos, Van Andel and several other billionaires in Grand Rapids is an obvious key for the Grand Rapids development, said Jim Becker, managing director in the Detroit office of Jones Lang LaSalle, who attended a bus trip to Grand Rapids as part of the first-ever "Bridging 96" exchange cosponsored by the Grand Rapids Business Journal and Crain's Detroit Business.

What has made the situation in Grand Rapids unique is the combination of access to capital and a cohesive development plan, he said.

"Usually, communities have one or the other, a vision but no investment or a lot of capital and no vision," Becker said. "Grand Rapids is a case study on what can happen when there is an integrated community strategy and a capital strategy."

In Detroit, Becker said, there has been a lot more vision than there has been investment.

The relations between brokers representing tenants and landlords seemed to be less adversarial in the Grand Rapids area, said Eric Duistermars, a senior associate with the Detroit office of UGL Equis Corp. and president of Detroit Office Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to bringing office tenants to Detroit.

"Overall, there seems to be this collaboration between the landlords and tenants in the early stages," he said. "They all seem to want the pieces of a project to come together."

The idea that the private sector can champion a cause and then take it to the public leadership is a key that Grand Rapids has had and Detroit has not, said Jim Renne, a principal with the Southfield architecture firm Rossetti Associates.

"There's also a greater can-do attitude," he said. "We sometimes have a vacuum on the east side that can implode all our optimism."

Renne lived in Grand Rapids 20 years ago and has visited many times over the years. Watching it expand, he said, the city has been working within a deliberate plan for growth.

"But at the same time, they've allowed for an organic growth within the themes," he said. "They're not just looking at buildings, but looking at sidewalks, streetscapes, amenities and industry. There's a care that, as an architect, I respect."

Renne said that getting an up-close look at Grand Rapids' development moved him personally to ask himself how he can have the same kind of positive attitude that Grand Rapids developers have had.

"Whether we want to complain or not, we have to ask ourselves whether or not we are willing to partner together to improve our community," he said. "We have to have a willingness to get things done."