Maurice Cox, the former planning director of the city of Detroit, remembers the first time Matthew Naimi wandered into his office in paint-splattered overalls in 2018, with fingernail polish, a kaffiyeh on his head, and his bare arms a constellation of tattoos. When Naimi told him that he wanted to develop a multimillion-dollar low-cost housing complex for artists out of one of the city’s most dilapidated automobile factories, long abandoned, “it was bordering on satire,” Cox recalled.
But Naimi, 51, who is of Iraqi heritage, and who runs a community recycling program, was dead serious. So was his partner, Oren Goldenberg, 41, a filmmaker and events producer who devoted his 20s to revitalizing a local synagogue. (His father is Israeli.)
And together, this odd couple of historic preservation has transformed the 1908 Lincoln Motor Company factory into Dreamtroit, a $31 million affordable haven for artists. Seven tumultuous years in the making, the nearly four-acre campus they own and have developed now has 76 studio lofts, retains its graffiti-splashed interior walls and is crowned with a steel sculpture — the “Freak Beacon” — inspired by the TV Tower in Berlin.
Detroit’s decaying factories have long served as photogenic backdrops for the motor city’s “ruin porn,” with local officials regarding them as eyesores ripe for demolition and redevelopment. Dreamtroit represents a new direction, its buildings “keystones of the city’s automotive industrial heritage seen as places of possibility,” said Daniel Campo, an associate professor of design and planning at Morgan State University, in Baltimore.
Goldenberg and Naimi exemplify what Campo, in a recent book, calls “Postindustrial DIY,” an entrepreneurial improvisatory spirit forging a path in a “post-abandonment city,” he said. Dreamtroit, where residents started moving in last year, and officially opened last month, is in the vanguard of several developments poised to transform moribund automotive facilities into apartments and lofts.