Bernie told me how he’d bought a 1,500-square-foot apartment in Detroit in a high-end co-op building for $20,000.* That’s not a misprint—he paid fourteen dollars per square foot to own, not rent. The same apartment in Manhattan would have cost sixty to eighty times as much. Jon Zemke, an enterprising University of Michigan grad, was buying houses for $30,000 or so, rehabbing them himself, and renting them out. He’s now up to twenty units after starting
