There are not enough affordable housing units in Detroit, but the city and community members are working to change that.
The Campbell Street Apartments is a new $18 million affordable housing development in Southwest Detroit’s East Chadsey-Condon neighborhood.
Leading the charge of the project is MiSide Community Impact Network. The nonprofit works to provide resources for entire communities to create stability for people.
MiSide and Detroit officials broke ground late 2023 to bring the housing complex to the community. A ribbon cutting ceremony for the new development is taking place with Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and community partners on Thursday.
President and CEO of MiSide Community Impact Network Sean De Four joined The Metro to discuss how the organization is working to create affordable housing in Detroit.
Use the media player above to hear the full conversation.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand.
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The 12,000-square-foot building will be at the Coleman A Young Municipal Airport. It’s the first new commercial development at the site in 60 years.
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan says this expansion is the beginning of more development projects for the airport.
“Before spring is over, there’s going to be another groundbreaking down there of another corporate hangar for jets, and then there’ll be another after that,” he said. “Next year, they’re going to take that air traffic control tower and start to build a new one on the other side of the airport, to open up the airfield.”
Duggan says the airport also plans to build a new administrative building and make several runway safety improvements.
MyFlight Tours headquarters is expected to open in late 2025.
Other headlines for Thursday, April 10, 2025:
The city of Dearborn reported a 34% drop of overdoses and six fewer deaths from overdose for the years 2023-2024.Dearborn Health Department’s Director Ali Abazeed says the department’s Narcan vending machine at the Dearborn train station has helped reduce those numbers.
Michigan State University and Apple are partnering to bring a manufacturing academy to downtown Detroit. The free program will be open to small and medium businesses to help them implement advanced manufacturing practices, including AI and smart manufacturing techniques.
The Matrix Theater Company is hosting an 18+ puppet karaoke event from 8 p.m. to midnight on Friday, April 11. Participants can sing live or lip-sync, or have someone else puppeteer while you sing on stage or behind the curtain.
Do you have a community story we should tell? Let us know in an email at detroiteveningreport@wdet.org.
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WDET strives to make our journalism accessible to everyone. As a public media institution, we maintain our journalistic integrity through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
Plan Detroit is three-phase planning process informed by resident feedback that is expected to conclude with implementation of the new collaborative policies by 2026.
According to the city, the Michigan planning enabling act (MPEA) recommends cities update their master plans every 10 years, and Detroit’s master plan has not been comprehensively updated since 2009.
The upcoming events are intended to provide an “interactive” opportunity to work with city planners to create practical policies that address real concerns for Detroiters.
Sessions will take place at 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 12, and at 5:30 p.m. April 14-16. All sessions will be held at the Joseph Walker Williams Community Center at 8431 Rosa Parks Blvd., Detroit. Topics will include Neighborhoods & Housing, Open Space & Environment, Arts & Culture; and Mobility & Jobs.
For more information and to register to attend, visit plandetroit.com.
Other headlines for Tuesday, April 1, 2025:
Detroit firefighters are trying to find out what caused an apartment building on the city’s west side to explode. The Detroit Fire Department is also apologizing for an emergency alert that went out to cellphones throughout metro Detroit around 6 a.m. Monday morning notifying people about the blast.
Gas prices rose sharply overnight, with AAA Michigan reporting drivers paid an average of $3.25 a gallon for regular unleaded — 10 cents more than yesterday.
Do you have a community story we should tell? Let us know in an email at detroiteveningreport@wdet.org.
Trusted, accurate, up-to-date.
WDET strives to make our journalism accessible to everyone. As a public media institution, we maintain our journalistic integrity through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
Editor’s note: This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization; BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina;WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station; WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region; and Interlochen Public Radio.
The Trump administration’s freeze on funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law from the Biden era, has left farmers and rural businesses across the country on the hook for costly energy efficiency upgrades and renewable energy installations.
The grants are part of the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, originally created in the 2008 farm bill and supercharged by funding from the IRA. It provides farmers and other businesses in rural areas with relatively small grants and loans to help lower their energy bills by investing, say, in more energy-efficient farming equipment or installing small solar arrays.
By November 2024, the IRA had awarded more than $1 billion for nearly 7,000 REAP projects, which help rural businesses in low-income communities reduce the up-front costs of clean energy and save thousands on utility costs each year.
But now, that funding is in limbo. Under the current freeze, some farmers have already spent tens of thousands of dollars on projects and are waiting for the promised reimbursement. Others have had to delay work they were counting on to support their businesses, unsure when their funding will come through — or if it will.
REAP is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Secretary Brooke Rollins said the agency is “coming to the tail end of the review process” of evaluating grants awarded under the Biden administration.
“If our farmers and ranchers especially have already spent money under a commitment that was made, the goal is to make sure they are made whole,” Rollins told reporters in Atlanta last week.
But it’s not clear when the funds might be released, or whether all the farmers and business owners awaiting their money will receive it.
The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern Michigan draws over 1.5 million visitors every year. Jim Lively hopes some of those people will camp RVs at a nearby site he’s planning to open next to his family’s local food market. He wants to use solar panels to help power the campsite and offset electric bills for the market, where local farmers bring produce directly to the store.
Lively helped promote REAP during his time at the environmental nonprofit Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities, where he’d worked for over two decades. So the program was on his mind when it came time to replace the market’s big, south-facing roof.
“We put on a metal roof, and worked with a contractor who was also familiar with the REAP program, and we said, ‘Let’s make sure we’re setting this up for solar,’” he said. “So it was kind of a no-brainer for us.”
They were told they had been approved for a REAP grant of $39,696 last summer — half of the project’s total cost — but didn’t feel the need to rush the solar installation. Then, at the end of January, Lively was notified that the funding had been paused.
The interior of the Lively NeighborFood Market, where owner Jim Lively likes to feature local produce. He was hoping to install a solar roof this year, but the funding has been stalled.
The property runs on electricity, rather than natural gas, and Lively wants to keep it that way. But those electric bills have been expensive — about $2,000 a month last summer, he said. When they get the RV site up and running, he expects those bills to approach $3,000.
Selling local food means operating within tight margins. Lively said saving on energy would help, but they won’t be able to move ahead with the rooftop solar unless the REAP funding is guaranteed.
Continuing to power the property with electricity rather than fossil fuels is a kind of personal commitment for Lively. “Boy, solar is also the right thing to do,” he said. “And it’s going to be difficult to do that without that funding.”
Joshua Snedden at a farmers market.
For Joshua Snedden, a REAP grant was the key to making his 10-acre farm in Monee, Illinois, more affordable and environmentally sustainable. But months after installing a pricey solar array, he’s still waiting on a reimbursement from the federal government — and the delay is threatening his bottom line.
“I’m holding out hope,” said Snedden, a first-generation farmer in northeast Illinois. “I’m trying to do everything within my power to make sure the funding is released.”
In December, his five-year old operation, Fox at the Fork, began sourcing its power from a new 18.48 kilowatt solar array which cost Snedden $86,364. The system currently offsets all the farm’s electricity use and then some.
REAP offers grants for up to half of a project like this, and loan guarantees for up to 75 percent of the cost. For Snedden, a $19,784 REAP reimbursement grant made this solar array possible. But the reimbursement, critical to Snedden’s cash flow, was frozen by Trump as part of a broader review of the USDA’s Biden-era commitments.
Joshua Snedden is a first-generation farmer who said he will continue whether or not he gets the federal funding for solar.
Snedden grows the produce he takes to market — everything from tomatoes to garlic to potatoes — on about an acre of his farm. He also plans to transform the rest of his land into a perennial crop system, which would include fruit trees like pears, plums, and apples planted alongside native flowers and grasses to support wildlife.
A solar array was always part of his plans, “but seemed like a pie in the sky” kind of project, he said, adding he thought it might take him a decade to afford such an investment.
The REAP program has been a lifeline for Illinois communities struggling with aging infrastructure and growing energy costs, according to Amanda Pankau with the Prairie Rivers Network, an organization advocating for environmental protection and climate change mitigation across Illinois.
“By lowering their electricity costs, rural small businesses and agricultural producers can put that money back into their business,” said Pankau.
That’s exactly what Snedden envisioned from his investment in the solar power system. The new solar array wouldn’t just make his farm more resilient to climate change, but also more financially viable, “because we could shift expenses from paying for energy to paying for more impactful inputs for the farm,” he said.
He anticipates that by switching to solar, Fox at the Fork will save close to $3,200 dollars a year on electric bills.
Now, Snedden is waiting for the USDA to hold up their end of the deal.
“The financial strain hurts,” said Snedden. “But I’m still planning to move forward growing crops and fighting for these funds.”
Jon and Brittany Klimstra are both scientists who are originally from western North Carolina. They returned to the area to start a farm and an orchard and are waiting for solar funds they were promised.
At the start of the year, Jon and Brittany Klimstra were nearly ready to install a solar array on their Polk County, North Carolina farm after being awarded a REAP grant in 2024.
As two former scientists who had moved back to western North Carolina 10 years ago to grow apples and be close to their families, it felt like a chance to both save money and live their values.
“We’ve certainly been interested in wanting to do something like this, whether it be for our personal home or for our farm buildings for a while,” said Jon. “It just was cost prohibitive up to this point without some type of funding.”
That funding came when they were awarded $12,590 from REAP for the installation. But, after the Trump administration’s funding freeze, the money never came.
“We were several site visits in, several engineering conversations. We’ve had electricians, the solar company,” said Brittany . “It’s been a very involved process.”
Since the grant is reimbursement-based, the Klimstras have already paid out-of-pocket for some costs related to the project. Plus, the farm had been banking on saving $1,300 in utilities expenses per year. In a given month, their electricity bill is $300-$400.
Apples from the orchard run by Jon and Brittany Klimstra. They were ready to install a solar array when the federal funding was frozen.
Across Appalachia, historically high energy costs have made the difference between survival and failure for many local businesses, said Heather Ransom, who works with Solar Holler, a solar company that serves parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio.
“We have seen incredible rate increases across the region in electricity over the past 10, even 20 years,” she said.
Through Solar Holler, REAP grants also passed into the hands of rural library systems and schools; the company installed 10,000 solar panels throughout the Wayne County, West Virginia school system. About $6 million worth of projects supported by Solar Holler are currently on hold.
In other parts of the region, community development financial institutions like the Mountain Association in eastern Kentucky combatted food deserts through helping local grocery stores apply for REAP.
Solar Holler also works in coal-producing parts of the region, where climate change discussions have been fraught with the realities of declining jobs and revenue from the coal industry. The program helped make the case for communities to veer away from coal and gas-fired energy.
“What REAP has helped us do is show people that it’s not just a decision that’s driven by environmental motives or whatever, it actually makes good business sense to go solar,” Ransom said. In her experience, saving money appeals to people of all political persuasions. “At the end of the day, we’ve installed just as much solar on red roofs as we do blue roofs, as we do rainbow roofs or whatever.”
The grants aren’t only for solar arrays and other renewable energy systems. Many are for energy efficiency improvements to help farmers save on utility bills, and in some cases cut emissions. In Georgia, for instance, one farm was awarded just under $233,000 for a more efficient grain dryer, an upgrade projected to save the farm more than $16,000 per year. Several farms were awarded funding to convert diesel-powered irrigation pumps to electric.
The USDA did not directly answer Grist’s emailed questions about the specific timeline for REAP funds, the amount of money under review, or the future of the program. Instead, an emailed statement criticized the Biden administration’s “misuse of hundreds of billions” of IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law (BIL) funds “all at the expense of the American taxpayer.”
“USDA has a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy. As part of this effort, Secretary Rollins is carefully reviewing this funding and will provide updates as soon as they are made available,” the email said.
Two federal judges have already ordered the Trump administration to release the impounded IRA and BIL funds. Earthjustice, a national environmental law organization, filed a lawsuit last week challenging the freeze of USDA funds on behalf of farmers and nonprofits.
“The administration is causing harm that can’t be fixed, and fairness requires that the funds continue to flow,” said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.
Rollins released the first tranche of funding February 20 and announced the release of additional program funds earlier this month. That did not include the REAP funding.
The USDA announced Wednesday it would expedite funding for farmers under a different program in honor of National Agriculture Day, but as of March 20 had not made an announcement about REAP.
Rahul Bali of WABE contributed reporting to this story.
Loneliness in America is bad and getting worse. In recent decades, participation in associations and clubs has gone down while the percentage of people living alone has increased. The negative health consequences can quite literally be life and death.
When COVID-19 hit Michigan in 2020, we were forced to isolate ourselves for survival. But the consequences of isolation pose a continued risk to our health and well-being. In 2023, former surgeon general Vivek Murthy issued an advisory warning that isolation poses a health risk equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Today on The Metro, we’re looking at the treatment for isolation: connecting with people. And while it seems like a no-brainer, society and our built environment has changed in ways that make seeing our neighbors, friends, family and even meeting strangers more difficult.
Guests:
Anita Zavala: Director of Entrepreneurship and Wealth Building at the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation. The organization and many in the community are connecting with their neighbors and providing help to those affected by the water main break and flooding in Southwest Detroit.
Eric Klinenberg: The Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He also led a widely-cited study on the 1995 Chicago heat wave, revealing how crucial our social connections really are. His most recent book is “2020: One city, seven people, and the year everything changed.”
We also asked listeners:
“Where do you go to connect with your neighbors and community?”
Use the media player above to hear the conversation.
Black History Month is almost over. But at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, everyday is a good day to celebrate Black History. Manager of Community Engagement Yolanda Jack joined the show to talk about the significance of the museum for Detroit.
WDET’s Ryan Patrick Hooper spoke with Anthony Roth Costanzo about the story behind “Rinaldo” and the power of opera in 2025. It follows a trend at Detroit Opera to find new ways to present old operas. The last two shows of “Rinaldo” are on Friday and Sunday.
In her second-to-last State of the State speech, Governor Gretchen Whitmer focused on funding the roads, spending on education and limiting cell phone use in schools. To discuss what Democrats and Republicans made of the speech, Russ McNamara of WDET’s All Things Considered joined the show.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand.
Trusted, accurate, up-to-date.
WDET strives to make our journalism accessible to everyone. As a public media institution, we maintain our journalistic integrity through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
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