![]() ![]() “Without these smart fellows coming into Detroit, this new company wouldn’t have existed, and this house might not have been renovated,” said Tatoris, whose own digital startup, Are You a Human, has employed two VFA fellows. Reid Tatoris, a startup founder who employed Nussenbaum for two years before he started his own company, is a fan of the VFA model. Modeled on the successful Teach For America, it offers talented college graduates an alternative career path to finance and law, and in the process, revitalizes cities and creates jobs. It’s the kind of problem solving that Andrew Yang, the founder and CEO of Venture for America, envisioned when he started the program in 2011. The renovation, which is still ongoing, gave the group a valuable education in property management - so much so that in 2014, Nussenbaum and two of the other owners, Tim Dingman and Scott Lowe, launched Castle, a company that provides landlords an online platform for screening tenants, collecting rent and coordinating ongoing maintenance. Even though the house had no kitchen, holes in the floor and a big piece of plywood over the front door, a recent housewarming party was a success. Several investors ponied up a total of $200,000, and the four began rehabbing the house, doing most of the work themselves during evenings and weekends. The four formed a business, Rebirth Realty, and went to private investors with an idea: in exchange for a financial investment, the homeowners would offer a guaranteed share of the rental-income profits from a steady stream of reliable Venture for America tenants. Next they cast about for a more serious pile of money to make the house livable. “But living in the city, it’s impossible not to become somewhat interested in real estate, because the biggest problems Detroit faces are all these urban-related problems of blight, infrastructure and population loss that have real estate at their core.” “None of us had any interest in real estate,” Nussenbaum said. The roommates and partners are fixing up the house to live in, but plan to rent it later. They scraped together $10,000 from family and friends, plus another $6,000 from Venture for America’s innovation fund. But it was slated to sell at a tax auction for $8,000 - a price that seemed realistic for the recent college graduates. The house needed a new roof and a new electrical system. Scavengers had ripped out the copper plumbing. ![]() The seven-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot Prairie-style house was “completely destroyed,” said Nussenbaum, 24. What would happen if the church helped create opportunities for innovators to unleash their problem-solving energies to address local community issues?Īfter one of the fellows spotted an abandoned house three miles north of downtown, the four checked it out. ![]()
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