
As [researched and] told by Nthanda Manduwi
I was sitting at my desk on a sunny Detroit morning [1], setting up my Lessons Conversation[2] workflow on Substack[3], clearing my backlog, when Jerjuan invited me to spend a day moving through the city as an immersion. In 30 minutes, I had showered and gotten into an Uber on my way towards Puritan Ave. The plan for the day was simple: sit, watch, listen, and let the structure of the place reveal itself.
Our day began at Howard Family Bookstore [4], a westside project being built into more than a retail footprint—Jerjuan’s bet that a corner can carry multiple functions at once: books, coffee, gathering, and literacy programming.
Read more about the Howard Family Bookstore
Local reporting describes the store as a renovation of a long-abandoned building on Puritan Avenue, intended as a “hub for books, coffee, and connection,” explicitly tied to neighborhood literacy and community use rather than pure transaction. [5] The published plans—coffee, tea, juices, events, and even immersive components meant to locate the corridor historically—read less like a product list and more like an attempt to reintroduce a missing civic layer. [6]
I opened my computer, published one episode, and started the configuration of setting up a custom domain for the podcast on Substack.
First thing about the bookstore, despite it not being yet open is the amount foot traffic it get. People are somehow always walking in and out: friends and strangers alike.
Detroit’s base economic facts matter in the background of everything that follows. The city’s median household income is under $40,000 (2020–2024, inflation-adjusted), and roughly one-third of residents are in poverty. [7] They define what it means for “ownership” to exist as something more than identity or symbolism. They define how thin the margin is between a functioning community institution and an empty storefront.

Delve into Business and International Development with Nthanda Manduwi
After a month of living in the city, I attended a Detroit Economic Growth Corporation event where the City of Detroit was awards 13 businesses with grants amounting to $300,000.
The room was filled with founders, policymakers, and ecosystem builders gathered around a shared objective: increasing the probability that companies are built and sustained here.
I really like how the City of Detroit is approaching their entrepreneurship programming. It is quite deliberate: municipal grants, residency stipends, coworking access, and roles like Director of Entrepreneurship are all designed to reduce friction and create density.
As someone who is both an entrepreneur and a policy analyst, I find myself more than curious. From the inside, the strategy feels coherent. Capital is being deployed, networks are forming, and leadership is aligned around making Detroit competitive for builders.
But the city reveals itself differently once you leave that room. Moving through Detroit with the Director of Youth Affairs, Jerjuan Howard, the layers begin to separate.
Institutional support, ecosystem energy, and neighborhood reality do not fully overlap—they operate in parallel. Jerjuan’s work—through debate programs, public space, and the Howard Family Bookstore—exists at the level where rebuilding becomes physical and immediate.
His question at the end of the day to me,“Do you plan to stay?” left me reflecting on what I hope to gain from and give to Detroit.
Thanks for reading Lessons Conversation! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support this work.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcast.lessonsconversation.com

The first thing I noticed is that the bookstore is an active site that holds social and economic interactions at the same time. People move in and out without the cues of a typical merchant space—no single purpose yet governs the room. Someone is discussing logistics. Someone else is coordinating youth programming. Jerjuan is simultaneously host, operator, and connector.
That is the context in which I met Antonice J. Strickland[8], founder of Nice’s Tea House[9]. She told me her origin story in the plain way: entrepreneur to entrepreneur; when we are not performing for investors: the pandemic created a forced stillness, she was already a serious tea drinker, she began blending, testing, iterating, and eventually formalizing what had started as private consumption. In the bookstore, this lands as something specific: she will be curating her teas inside Jerjuan’s space. The product is one thing; the placement is another. A tea company becomes part of a neighborhood node.
Nice’s Tea House, in its own description, is “Black & female-owned,” developed intentionally and packaged in Detroit. [10] That statement matters in geography: the packaging and value-add are not outsourced by default; they are located. In institutional economics terms, that is a choice about where capabilities sit.
This took me back to 2021, when I was building the “Kwathu Innovation & Creative Centre” in Lilongwe[11]—trying to assemble, in one physical space, functions that were otherwise scattered: workstations, convening, creative production, early-stage venture formation. That project taught me a simple rule: in cities where formal infrastructure is thin, multi-purpose nodes do not “supplement” the system; they are the system.
Antonice’s story becomes an entry point into “Black owned” in a way that is economically legible: ownership begins as self-sufficiency before it becomes commerce. It starts with the ability to produce something—blend, package, distribute—under constraint, before “market” arrives as recognition. When we reduce ownership to a label, we miss its primary function: the ability to capture value locally, to hold it long enough for reinvestment, and to build repeatable capability.
Inside the bookstore, other forms of capability are present. Jerjuan’s tax officer is doing real work in the space—business compliance, accounting realities, the administrative substrate that makes an enterprise legible to the state. And the management team for Umoja Debate League[12] is working from the bookstore as well—planning, coordinating, handling the unglamorous operations of youth programming.
Umoja’s own description is explicit: it uses debate to teach Detroit youth (ages 11–18) transferable skills such as critical thinking, confidence, conflict resolution, literacy, and self-expression. [13] Jerjuan is named in external profiles as founder of both Umoja and the bookstore, with programming reaching “over 25 schools.” [14] Whether the exact count fluctuates, the structural point holds: this is not one project. It is a linked set of interventions across education, culture, and neighborhood development.
This is what I mean by “node.” The bookstore is a place where overlapping systems—finance, education, culture, community—share a single physical footprint. In high-income environments, these functions are separated into institutions: a bank, a school program office, a community center, a café, a library. In low-income environments, they are either absent or fragmented. Here, they are being recomposed through private initiative, volunteer infrastructure, and the slow accumulation of trust and repetition.
In that sense, ownership is not a moral concept. It is an engineering concept. It is about where decisions, capabilities, and cashflows reside.
We left the bookstore and drove to Cody High School[15], where Jerjuan was meeting with a few students. We were welcomed by Renald Martin.
Cody’s own public-facing description says it serves grades 9 through 12, “welcoming over 530 students,” with academics, athletics, and a range of programs (robotics, e-sports, culinary arts, film production). [17] That matters because “constraint” is not the same as “absence.” Even in under-resourced environments, schools can still hold structured routines, adult supervision, and managed curricula. They are not identical to a neighborhood node, but they are still scaffolding.
Jerjuan framed the school in comparative terms: how Detroit has more competitive pathways and admissions processes for certain schools, alongside open-enrollment schools like Cody. The district’s own materials confirm that an application system exists for some programs and high schools, organizing access through deadlines, selection criteria, and constrained seats. [18] Whether a child wins that lottery matters. But my interest is less in prestige than in what selection does to a system: it changes peer composition, resource concentration, and expectations.
Inside Cody, the most striking moments were about how students narrate their futures, and what that says about the labor market they are inheriting.
When asked what they wanted to be, two girls answered that they wanted to be teachers.
In the abstract, that is good news. Teaching is a core societal function.
But “good” is not the same as economically rational. The United States’ [and perhaps global world] wage structure does not reward essential labor in proportion to its social value; it rewards labor based on bargaining power, capital intensity, licensing regimes, market concentration, and the political economy of public spending. You can respect a profession while still interrogating its compensation structure.
Here is the specific tension: the teaching workforce is disproportionately female. Pew Research, citing National Center for Education Statistics data, estimates that about 77% of K–12 public school teachers are women. [19] At a national level, women still earn less than men on average; in 2024, women’s median weekly earnings were about 83% of men’s among full-time wage and salary workers. [20] Occupational sorting matters in this gap. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has long documented gender concentration by occupation; for example, women constituted roughly 80% of elementary and middle school teachers in 2020, while being underrepresented in many higher-paying technical fields. [21]
So when a teenage girl says “teacher,” there is a double reading: – She may be choosing public purpose and social contribution. – She may also be stepping into a gendered occupational track that is systematically undervalued, precisely because it is feminized and tied to public budgets rather than private pricing power.
I do not want to “discourage” teaching. As a systems builder, that is not even coherent: societies need educators the way they need water infrastructure. But I do want to surface the implication: if we continue to concentrate girls and women in lower-paid essential roles while steering boys toward higher-compensated technical roles, we reproduce inequality while maintaining the social fabric. That is not accidental; it is an outcome of institutional design—how we fund schools, how we price care work, and how we distribute prestige across disciplines.
Cody also gave me an example of agency emerging within constraint. Students were working on a campaign around substance abuse and vaping—“Break the Vape.” National surveillance data helps contextualize why this matters: e-cigarettes remain the most commonly used tobacco product among U.S. youth, even as usage has declined. CDC reporting on the 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey indicates that current e-cigarette use among middle and high school students fell to about 5.9% in 2024 (from 7.7% in 2023), with roughly 7.8% among high school students. [22]
School campaigns like “Break the Vape” are not just health messaging. They are a form of governance training. Students practice diagnosing a problem, communicating a norm, and mobilizing peers. In other words: even within constrained systems, agency emerges.
We later returned to the bookstore, and the room resumed its earlier logic: continuous movement, overlapping conversations, people with purposes that did not require formal invitations. The same chairs held different functions. The same counter became both meeting point and informal boundary line between public and private work.
This is where the bookstore’s role as a bridge becomes clearest to me. It sits between fragmented and structured environments. It can absorb people who are not anchored to institutions, while also hosting actors who move comfortably through formal systems—tax preparation, youth program administration, structured events. It is porous in a way schools and government offices are not.
And then, as if to prove the point, a child wandered in.
Anthony did not come from Cody. He was not part of any meeting. He entered informally—unscheduled, not tied to any institution.
Jerjuan welcomed him warmly, and I was to realize he was a regular here. He was to later say to me, “I try to wrap my arms around him. I know there is only so much I can do.”
Anthony is 12. The details he offered came in fragments, the way children talk when there is no single stable story to tell. He had been living with his aunt; his aunt moved; now he lives with his cousin. New neighborhood. New social geography.
The first hard fact landed early: Anthony told me he does not read. Not “I don’t like reading.” Not “I’m behind.” He said he does not know how, and he is not interested in learning.
In most policy writing, that sentence would trigger a reflex: intervention, remediation, program design. But in the room, what mattered was not the label—“illiteracy”—but the structure he had already built to survive without literacy.
He said he is good at math. In class, when the question is wordy, he asks classmates to read the text out loud so he can “focus on the math.”
That is a system.
It is not ideal. It is not sustainable. But it is functional: divide labor socially, outsource the bottleneck, preserve cognitive energy for the domain where he can perform. In other settings, we call this workflow design. In a 12-year-old, it reads as adaptation.
When I asked what he likes to do, he said he likes to work and make money. He looked at my work setup: my iPhone, iPad, and Macbook. He told me that he wanted an iPhone. I asked him why. His answer was simple: everyone around him has one.
This is where the economic reading becomes sharper. Demand is rarely only about the object. The iPhone is not just a phone in a social ecosystem to someone like Anthony; it is a credential. It signals inclusion, normalcy, the ability to participate in the available social life. When you lack stability, you learn to seek signals of belonging because belonging functions as informal insurance.
I told Anthony I did not have my first iPhone until I was about 25. He looked genuinely shocked, as if I had revealed an alternative physics. His reaction mattered more than the fact itself. In that moment, he saw that the consumption timeline he assumed was “standard” was not universal.
Exposure to alternative timelines information. Information changes the perceived feasible set. For a child whose reference group is immediate, tight, and economically constrained, the timeline collapses: want now, have now, or you are excluded now. When you widen the timeline, you also widen the strategy space.
Then Anthony told me he wants to be an entrepreneur when he grows up—he struggled to pronounce the word, but he insisted on the concept. And he added something almost incongruent with his earlier material desire: he wants to help people “get back on the right path.”
I am careful with that kind of statement. I do not romanticize it. But I also do not dismiss it. A child who has seen enough disorder to talk about “the right path” is processing a moral economy as well as a cash economy. He is saying, in his own way: the system around me produces drift. I want to be someone who can reverse drift—for myself, and maybe for others.
This is where, in my mind, the phrase “capacity within constraint” reached its limit. Anthony is not within constraint the way Cody students are. Cody is constrained but structured. Anthony is constrained and unstructured. No formal institution was holding him at the moment he entered the bookstore. The bookstore, in that moment, acted as a temporary scaffold.
The practical question people ask in these moments is, “Why didn’t his parents…?”
It is an understandable impulse. But Jerjuan and I spoke about something else: what level of disorientation a parent must be living through to be absent from a child’s life in this way—the depth and darkness upstream of the child.
That is not absolution. It is system diagnosis.
Disruption does not start with the child. It arrives at the child; and in arriving, it forces design decisions. A child without consistent adult scaffolding designs survival workflows. Anthony’s math workaround is not laziness; it is optimization under conditions where teaching, reinforcement, and daily support have been intermittent.
This is the anchor line that stayed with me:
We do not get to just measure intelligence by what people know, but by what they’ve had to figure out alone.
From my background, working inside United Nations[23] systems, later inside Microsoft[24], and now building Q2 Systems[25]—I have learned that informal systems emerge wherever formal infrastructure fails to provide continuity. Anthony is not a symbol. He is a data point: evidence that the city’s institutional coverage is uneven, and that children become the sites where this unevenness is revealed most brutally.
We ended the day at The Wildemere Bar and Grill[26], and I was somehow to be surprised by the quality of the food. I came in with an expectation I did not announce to myself: I expected something ordinary – fast food; and I encountered something carefully executed.
It matters, because perception is an economic actor. It shapes where dollars go. It shapes whether outsiders enter a corridor. It shapes whether local residents believe a new business can sustain quality and consistency.
Wildemere’s story, it turns out, is structurally aligned with the day’s theme. In March 2026, the City of Detroit publicly documented the opening as a family-owned business built out of a long-vacant building, supported by a $50,000 cash grant from Motor City Match[27]. [28] The city reports the restaurant seats about 100 guests, employs 17 Detroiters, and sits inside a mixed-use rehabilitation that took nearly a decade to complete. [29]
Wildemere is more than just a “restaurant story.” It is a capital allocation story.
Motor City Match is explicitly structured as a pipeline: technical assistance, design services, and gap-funding grants (up to $100,000, with cost-share requirements). [30] The city’s own reporting frames the program as a partnership among the city, the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, and other entities, leveraging public and philanthropic capital to close the financing gaps that often kill small businesses before they open. [29]
This is the point where “Black owned” becomes a financial architecture question: what instruments exist to make ownership feasible in a low-income geography? When the marginal cost of renovation is high, and the local customer base has limited purchasing power, conventional commercial lending becomes conservative. Programs like Motor City Match are an attempt to modify that constraint—not through motivation, but through structured co-financing.
Over dinner, we talked—briefly—about perceptions between Africans and Black Americans. The stereotypes run in both directions: Africans imagined as outsiders who “don’t understand,” Black Americans imagined as culturally distant from Africa or trapped in domestic histories. I have lived on both sides of those caricatures. My conclusion is this: different histories, same structural question.
Who owns the system?
Not who is visible inside it. Not who is invited to participate. Who owns enough of the productive infrastructure—land, storefronts, supply chains, financing channels, governance levers—to shape outcomes.
After dinner, we drove through Livernois Avenue[31]—also famously known as the Avenue of Fashion. Even at night, you can read a corridor by its density: storefront cadence, lighting, signage, the feel of a street that expects pedestrians rather than only cars. Jerjuan told me that avenue gets quite busy!
Livernois’ resurgence is not imaginary. The City of Detroit describes the Livernois streetscape project [between Clarita and Eight Mile] as being “significantly transformed” in fall 2019, with wider sidewalks [including space for café seating], protected bike lanes, updated lighting and landscaping, new pavement, underground infrastructure upgrades, and the removal of the median in favor of a center left-turn lane. [32] The American Planning Association frames the project as part of a broader strategy: redesigning the corridor as a place for people rather than only a traffic route, with the streetscape investment positioned as a catalyst for commercial vitality and neighborhood reconnection. [33]
The corridor is commonly described as historically significant for Black commerce. Local reporting and tourism narratives both frame it as a postwar shopping destination that declined as retail moved outward and then began to transform again in the late 2010s. [34] WXYZ quotes local business leadership calling it “one of the highest concentrations of Black-owned businesses on one street in America,” and describes it as a shopping mecca for African Americans. [35]
I treat those claims as directional rather than statistically audited, but the underlying phenomenon is visible: a concentration of independently owned businesses along a tight stretch, with enough density to produce foot traffic and crossover spending. BridgeDetroit notes that new restaurants and specialty shops have been filling previously vacant storefronts, with business owners emphasizing that restaurants create daily throughput that benefits adjacent retailers. [36]
The corridor’s cultural anchor is “local_business”,”Baker’s Keyboard Lounge”,”Detroit jazz club” Historical documentation describes Baker’s as operating continuously since 1934 and being widely regarded as the “oldest jazz club in the world,” with recognition from the International Association of Jazz Educators, and as a Michigan state historic site since 1986. [37] That continuity matters. Cultural institutions that persist across decades function like economic infrastructure: they stabilize attention, draw visitors, and signal that a place can outlast volatility.
What I wanted to understand, driving through Livernois after watching Anthony in the bookstore, was not simply the aesthetic of revival. It was the mechanism: how does a corridor shift from decline to density?
Part of the answer is public infrastructure investment—streets, sidewalks, lighting, safety, the things that reduce friction for pedestrians and reduce perceived risk for customers. [38] Part of the answer is organized financing and technical assistance—Motor City Match shows up again in corridor stories as gap funding that lets businesses open or expand. [39] And part of the answer is ownership structure: whether cashflows stay local long enough to compound.
Here the distinction between circulation and leakage becomes concrete. Economic development rhetoric often celebrates “spending” without asking where profits go. Locally owned businesses tend to keep a larger share of spending in the local economy through local payrolls, local procurement, and locally retained profits. A Michigan State University Extension report on “Why Buy Local?” summarizes this as a “local premium”: more money recirculates locally when purchases are made at locally owned businesses, building the tax base and raising local economic activity. [40] Institute for Local Self-Reliance reporting on Civic Economics studies provides a quantified example: in one Austin retail analysis, $100 spent at a local independent generated substantially more local economic activity than the same spending at a chain, precisely because more payroll and management functions were local rather than centralized elsewhere. [41]
Detroit’s case is not Austin’s, and these multipliers vary by sector and geography. But the principle scales: if ownership is local, it becomes easier for value to remain local. If ownership is absentee, leakage is structural.
That is why the Avenue of Fashion matters as a system. It is not that Black people are “included” in commerce there. It is that ownership density creates a different pattern of capital behavior. When businesses sit next to each other, they share customers, share reputation, share security externalities, and can coordinate informally. They build a corridor identity that becomes an asset. Public streetscape investment can then amplify, rather than replace, existing entrepreneurial activity. [42]
We ended the night driving through Sherwood Forest Historic District[43] in Jerjuan’s Ford Taurus, with the heated seats on. The sensory detail matters because I was a little bit chilly, and I appreciated how that softness set the tone for the neighbourhood we were about to drive into. Stability, in my view has a physical feeling: smooth pavement, predictable lighting, houses set back behind trees, quiet that reads like an enforced norm. I suppose it takes growing up in it to not take it for granted, and understand that the quiet is produced.
Sherwood Forest’s history makes the production visible. The Detroit Historical Society notes that the district was platted in 1917 [with an adjacent subdivision platted in 1926], contains roughly 435 houses mostly built in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and was listed as a local historic district in 2002. [44] Its boundaries—Seven Mile to the south, Livernois to the west, Pembroke to the north, Parkside to the east—matter because they locate the neighborhood directly beside the Avenue of Fashion corridor. [44]
The day ended with a geographic adjacency: an economically stable historic district bordering a historically Black commercial corridor that has experienced decline and reinvestment. The proximity collapses simplistic narratives in my view, and perhaps beautifully juxtaposed the detailed day we had just had. Detroit is not “reviving” or “failing” as a single unit. It is running multiple systems in parallel. Recovering. Sustaining. Building for the first time.
At this point, the day could be summarized as sentiment: hope here, struggle there. But that is not an economic analysis. A system lens requires different categories—continuity, scaffolding, leakage, and the institutional thickness that allows capability to reproduce itself.
Here is the cleanest map I can draw from one day:
| Space | Condition | Output you can observe |
| Howard Family Bookstore | Emerging infrastructure | Connection across domains |
| Cody High | Constrained infrastructure | Organized agency within limits |
| Unparented kids | Unstructured system | Adaptation, workaround design |
| Livernois | Rebuilt infrastructure | Ownership density, circulation |
| Sherwood Forest | Sustained infrastructure | Stability through continuity |
I think that core thesis is uncomfortable precisely because it removes romance and blame.
Outcomes are not about people. They are about infrastructure continuity.
When a neighborhood has sustained institutional maintenance across generations—property norms, school quality, tax base, civic enforcement—stability feels effortless. When a corridor receives coordinated investment that aligns infrastructure design with commerce, ownership density becomes visible again. [38] When a child like Anthony lacks consistent scaffolding, he designs survival systems that look like “attitude” to outsiders but function like engineering inside constraint.
And when a tea founder like Antonice builds a product line during a pandemic and then locates it inside a community node, we see the earliest layer of system formation: self-sufficiency evolving into structured commerce, commerce evolving into local circulation.
By the time I got home to sleep, I was no longer thinking about “Black owned” as a celebratory category. I was thinking about it as an operating condition.
Ownership is not a label. Ownership is an environment.
The question is less participation, and more who owns enough to shape the system.
The Lessons book series, releases on July 6, 2026.
Each book expands on the themes introduced here—examining systems, history, and the human behaviors that continue to shape our world.
Pre-orders are now open at bienbooks.com, and your early support means more than you know as I bring this body of work to life.
If you’d like to go deeper into my journey — from Malawi, through the United Nations to Microsoft, you can find it in my books.
P.S. for 2026, you can read any of my books via Kindle for only $2.99.
This offer is valid till the end of the year.
Links to the books are as below:
[1] [3] [30]
Motor City Match. (n.d.). About Motor City Match. https://www.motorcitymatch.com/about/
[2] [8] [18]
Detroit Public Schools Community District. (n.d.). Application schools. https://www.detroitk12.org/enroll/application-schools
[4] [5] [24]
Pinho, K. (2024). Young Detroiter transforms westside building into a community bookstore. Metro Times. https://www.metrotimes.com/news/young-detroiter-transforms-westside-building-into-a-community-bookstore-37824981/
[6] [16]
Shelf Awareness. (2024, November 14). Howard Family Bookstore coming to Detroit, Mich. https://www.shelf-awareness.com/theshelf/2024-11-14/howard_family_bookstore_coming_to_detroit_mich..html
[7]
U.S. Census Bureau. (n.d.). QuickFacts: Detroit city, Michigan. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/detroitcitymichigan/PST120224
[9] [22]
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). Notes from the field: E-cigarette and nicotine pouch use among youth — United States, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7335a3.htm
[10]
Nice’s Tea House. (n.d.). Nice’s Tea House. https://www.nicesteahouse.com/
[11] [34] [35] [43]
WXYZ. (n.d.). Inside the transformation of Detroit’s Avenue of Fashion: Celebrating Black-owned businesses in the city. https://www.wxyz.com/news/voices/inside-the-transformation-of-detroits-avenue-of-fashion-celebrating-black-owned-businesses-in-the-city
[12] [25] [28] [29]
City of Detroit. (2026, March). Motor City Match helps lifelong Detroiter open Wildemere Bar and Grill in Martin Park. https://detroitmi.gov/news/motor-city-match-helps-lifelong-detroiter-open-wildemere-bar-and-grill-martin-park
[13]
Umoja Debate League. (n.d.). Home. https://www.umojadebate.org/
[14]
Knight Foundation. (n.d.). Jerjuan Howard – Emerging City Champions. https://emergingcitychampions.org/champion/jerjuan-howard/
[15] [32] [38]
City of Detroit. (n.d.). Livernois streetscape project. https://detroitmi.gov/departments/department-public-works/complete-streets/streetscape-program/livernois-streetscape-project
[17]
Detroit Public Schools Community District. (n.d.). Cody High School. https://cody.detroitk12.org/
[19] [27]
Pew Research Center. (2024, September 24). Key facts about public school teachers in the U.S. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/24/key-facts-about-public-school-teachers-in-the-u-s/
[20]
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2024). Highlights of women’s earnings in 2024. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-earnings/2024/
[21] [31]
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2021). Women in the labor force: A databook. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-databook/2021/
[23] [41]
Institute for Local Self-Reliance. (n.d.). Local stores create triple the economic activity of chains. https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/local-stores-create-triple-economic-activity-chains/
[26] [44]
Detroit Historical Society. (n.d.). Sherwood Forest Historic District. https://www.detroithistorical.org/learn/online-research/encyclopedia-of-detroit/sherwood-forest-historic-district
[33] [42]
American Planning Association. (n.d.). Refashioning a commercial corridor in Detroit. https://www.planning.org/blog/9323701/refashioning-a-commercial-corridor-in-detroit/
[36] [39]
BridgeDetroit. (n.d.). New businesses bring resurgence of foot traffic to Detroit’s Avenue of Fashion. https://www.bridgedetroit.com/new-businesses-bring-resurgence-of-foot-traffic-to-detroits-avenue-of-fashion/
[37]
Historic Detroit. (n.d.). Baker’s Keyboard Lounge. https://historicdetroit.org/buildings/baker-s-keyboard-lounge
[40]
Michigan State University Extension. (n.d.). Why buy local? https://ced.msu.edu/upload/reports/why%20buy%20local.pdf
[45]
Visit Detroit. (n.d.). What’s old is new again: The historic Avenue of Fashion is revitalized. https://visitdetroit.com/inside-the-d/avenue-of-fashion/