Sue Mosey has never been afraid to take a risk in business. It may not always pan out for her, but when it does, it goes big. "I've found over the years that it's really hard to move the needle on the neighborhood, especially on the market side - growing rents or attracting more residents or anything - if you're not really willing to take quite as big of a risk," she said. For more than three decades, Mosey has been the Executive Director of Midtown Detroit, Inc., the non-profit organization responsible for community development, marketing, real estate, small business development and arts programming within Detroit’s University Cultural Center and New Center districts. Midtown Detroit also manages public space maintenance and a number of programs including the façade matching grant program and residential incentive programs. Projects that have been undertaken by the organization under her direction include public improvements such as new streetscapes and park development; greenway planning and construction; and residential and commercial real estate development and management. The organization also produces a number of signature arts events, including Dlectricity, Noel Night and movies and live theater productions in New Center Park. And after heading up the agency since the 1980s, Mosey has a new vision, post-pandemic, for continuing to build the area on Woodward, north of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Housing rates have been stable with a fairly constant demand for Midtown. But that has started to change the traditional makeup of the area. "I think we had gotten to a point where a lot of students were really priced out of the market, except for maybe graduate students," she said of the neighborhood. "I'm hoping with some of the new workforce housing units that are being developed, and maybe over time, we'll be a little bit more friendly to our student population that we think is a really critical part of our DNA here."
1:00 - Why she doesn't have a cell phone
1:30 - Her latest vision for Midtown
4:30 - Challenges for the neighborhood and how to keep people in homes
9:45 - Why the pandemic didn't Midtown as bad as other areas
11:30 - Her desire to preserve buildings as part of redevelopment
16:05 - Balancing preservation with new construction
18:10 - How Cass Corridor became Midtown
21:55 - Her succession plan
22:30 - What's still on her bucket list
24:35 - Her biggest failure in business and how she overcame it.