“I guess I chose to live here because I’m young and dumb,” Phil told me from the second-floor offices of Ponyride, the co-working and artist studio space he started in Corktown. Ponyride has received funding from the city and various nonprofits, and attention from Martha Stewart and American Express. “I wanted to feel like I was doing something. And Detroit felt like a place where I could have a voice. Detroit is a democratic city.… We never wanted Detroit to be an island.” But the new Detroit is in many ways being built as if it were an island, or perhaps more accurately a city-state within
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