A Detroit corner devoted to creativity builds a can-do spirit

Motor City Blight Busters founder John George spits out the mission statement "revitalize, repopulate and stabilize" as if it's one word, he's said it so many times to anyone who will listen. He really seems to believe his catch phrase that the Blight Busters is saving the world one neighborhood at a time -- starting with Detroit.

For the past 21years, we've seen the examples of his volunteer force dismantling rotting houses and fixing up others and making them habitable again.

But there's another facet of Blight Busters we don't hear so much about. It's called Artist Village.

George, his partner Alicia Marion and art director Chazz Miller believe it takes more than sturdy walls to make a home, and more than a couple blocks of stable houses to make a neighborhood. A neighborhood needs a soul. And that's why they started Artist Village: to give the Old Redford neighborhood on Detroit's west side a sense of community and shared purpose. The idea is, it could give folks the feeling that together they can make their corner of the city look better with art, and function better with the small businesses that art could spawn.

Yeah, it sounds kind of pie-in-the-sky, especially when you consider the stereotype of the "starving artist." But when you start talking to some of the village's resident artists, you realize they're dead serious about turning their endeavors into money-making businesses and helping young people in the neighborhood follow their creative passions right into entrepreneurship.

Marion is the director of Artist Village and the soul of the Village culture. She never says "Hi" to anyone, substituting "Peace" as a greeting, and just about everyone around the Village does the same. You almost feel you've entered the compound of a cult, except no one is pushing a particular religion here -- unless creativity, self-reliance and a sense of community could be the cornerstones of a church.

Well, maybe. There is a structure villagers refer to as "the temple," a kind of Asian gazebo designed and built by volunteers from the Detroit Burning Man community. It's a little architectural surprise behind some commercial businesses and bordering the Blight Busters headquarters.

Artist Village is a compound of a few storefronts, and the buildings and lots behind them, on Lahser at Grand River, down the block from the Redford Theatre. It includes one roofless building that was donated to the group. It's almost in the middle of the collective, behind the art gallery and performance space, next to the auto shop and soon-to-be-open coffee shop, and in front of the artist studios. When George looked into putting a lid on the structure, it was so costly that all involved decided it would make more sense to leave it roofless and now it forms an interior courtyard and community garden that sort of ties the rambling warren of structures together.

Artist Chazz Miller is the genie who finds grant money to fund mural projects around the city and marshals the volunteers to make them happen.