On September 12, the Kresge Foundation announced its relocation to the Marygrove Conservancy campus in Detroit as part of one of the boldest philanthropic place-based investments in recent memory.
It’s a move that the storied Michigan grantmaker has been building toward for a long time. In 2004, it had outgrown its headquarters in Troy, Michigan, a northern suburb of Detroit, relatively far-flung from the city center. The foundation had been based at that location in Troy for decades. Its board debated whether to relocate to Detroit proper but ultimately decided to build a new structure on its current site.
Fast-forward to 2014. The foundation had helped Detroit emerge from its 2013 bankruptcy as part of the philanthropy-backed “Grand Bargain” to bail the city out, and “there was a deep sentiment that we needed to revisit the question of moving” to the city, said president and CEO Rip Rapson — but again, the board decided to stay put. In the ensuing years, Kresge ramped up its longstanding work in Detroit, and the more it leaned into its core mission of expanding opportunity in America’s cities, “the more incongruous it seemed to be sitting in a lovely suburb,” Rapson said.
By 2023, the board decided to move to Detroit. The only question was where. After considering dozens of potential sites, Rapson and his team learned of space on the Marygrove Conservancy campus. It was a fortuitous opportunity. Since 2018, Kresge has invested $196 million in grants, low-cost loans and guarantees to support the conservancy’s transition from Marygrove College, which ceased academic operations in 2019, to a neighborhood-based education center.
As it announced its move this month, Kresge committed $130 million toward its new headquarters and the Marygrove campus, plus an additional $50 million for initiatives that promote homeownership, home repair and rental assistance in the surrounding Livernois-McNichols corridor. The new investments will start to flow next year, and Kresge’s staff will transition to the new headquarters in 2028.
Given all that’s transpired in the past nine months (and the past two weeks), it’s worth stressing that Kresge’s relocation and $180 million in related financial commitments were years in the making and not shaped in any way by the actions of the second Trump administration. That said, the foundation’s place-based work has taken on additional resonance at a time when funders are seeking to strengthen ties to communities and local organizations that can’t count on robust federal support.
“We hope,” Rapson said, “it becomes an example of how investment in cities and neighborhoods can provide something of an antidote to federal policies by making sure we fortify our commitment to community-problem solving, community-based capacity and community institutions.”
A closer look at Kresge’s community engagement process in Detroit
Of the $180 million in new commitments, Kresge will be issuing bonds to finance $130 million in headquarters construction and campus improvements. The balance of $50 million that it plans to invest in the surrounding neighborhoods will come out of the foundation’s grantmaking budget. Moving forward, it plans to put together a consortium of other regional funders to continue moving resources toward those neighborhoods.
Kresge’s tranche of community investments is a byproduct of its extensive engagement with Livernois-McNichols corridor residents. “The thing that we felt was most important is that we stand up and then help strengthen a community organization that could be a backbone organization for this kind of neighborhood planning,” Rapson said. As a result, in 2015, Kresge created the Live6 Alliance, a community planning and development organization focused on revitalizing the corridor and enhancing the quality of life in Northwest Detroit.
Kresge worked closely with the alliance to shape what became its $50 million investment in surrounding neighborhoods. For instance, the foundation will create, in partnership with the Live6 Alliance, a Resident Investment and Opportunity Fund that will prioritize, among other things, vacant land stewardship, home maintenance, property tax relief and rental assistance.
The foundation is also exploring how its move to Detroit and its new building could support residents and enhance the surrounding businesses, churches and other entities. “If we are going to be a neighbor to you,” Rapson said, “what are some ways we can be more responsive to the day-to-day lives of our neighbors?”
Over the past several months, Kresge, working with nationally renowned urban planner Toni L. Griffin and Detroit architect Dan Pitera, has worked with residents and city planners to identify a set of areas, such as health and wellness, and small business development, that are of “real importance to the community,” Rapson said. “We’re going to keep this process going as we begin to get more concrete about what the facility itself will do.” To this point, he envisions the new headquarters as potentially having a lobby area that’s open to the public and space for community members and organizations.
According to the foundation, the $180 million commitment brings Kresge’s total investments in the Livernois-McNichols corridor to nearly $400 million.
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How Kresge is tackling the “classic urban problem” of displacement
Kresge’s leaders are acutely aware that ambitious neighborhood development projects run the risk of exacerbating what Rapson called the “classic urban problem” of displacing long-term residents.
In 2022, the foundation provided a grant to the Brookings Institution’s Andre Perry for research exploring what community investment without resident displacement looks like. Two years later, Perry and Hannah Stephens produced a report showing that throughout the 20-year study period, the Livernois-McNichols corridor that Kresge had been investing in for years remained over 90% Black despite overall losses in population, while homeownership rates stayed largely unchanged. “It’s about the only neighborhood in Detroit that hasn’t gentrified,” Rapson said. “We’ve been very deliberate about trying to make sure people weren’t displaced by these investments.”
That said, the economic development that will likely spring from Kresge’s relocation may bring a new set of challenges.
“One of the things that wasn’t much of a surprise as much as a real wake-up call was that neighbors really wanted us to think about how we could prevent taxes from forcing them out,” Rapson said. “Is there some kind of tax subsidy or tax abatement strategies for residents or rental properties that we could develop? We don’t know what the answer will be exactly, but that’s one of the things we’ve asked our federal experts to come in and talk about, because it’s been done in other places.”
Another salient takeaway from Kresge’s community engagement process was the centrality of arts and culture to the area’s development plan. Many Motown artists had lived in the neighborhood, which is home to a handful of major arts galleries, while Marygrove College had a deep tradition of arts and culture during its 100-plus-year existence. “There’s a deep, longstanding sense about the importance of arts and culture that we need to give thought to,” Rapson said, “not only in what we preserve but what we continue to advance.”
Trump 2.0 cuts have affected Kresge grantees
Like every funding leader I’ve spoken with in the last nine months, Rapson said that numerous Kresge grantee partners have been adversely affected by the actions of the Trump administration this year.
“You can scroll across our entire portfolios — health, human services, arts, higher ed — and in every single one, I think you can point to examples of folks who lost funding, laid people off, or have had to figure out how to bridge funding sources,” he said. Given this stark reality, he and his team “are trying to assess with real care what this all means for communities, people, organizations, and activities on the ground, and then try to work with them to get them out the other side.” (Kresge is also among the 165-and-counting foundations that signed an open letter defending their work amid fears the Trump administration could target their tax-exempt status.)
It’s against this fraught backdrop that Kresge will be rolling out new investments to organizations in northwest Detroit and relocating to its new headquarters. In doing so, it’s sketching out a replicable playbook for other place-based funders, acting as a catalyst to drive economic development while keeping long-time residents in their homes, strengthen community cohesion at a time when residents and organizations are on edge, and embedding foundation staff in the neighborhood that it serves.
“The relocation from a suburban location to a neighborhood is a big deal,” Rapson said. “I can only think of a handful of major philanthropies that have done that.”
Kresge’s relocation is certainly consequential, but Rapson also acknowledges that detractors may question why a multibillion-dollar foundation would choose to leave its perfectly serviceable suburban headquarters.
“Someone asked me the other day, ‘Don’t you think there’s going to be pushback? You’re bringing this big institution from the suburbs, you’re landing in the middle of a neighborhood, you’re spending all this money on a building?’” Rapson said. “I responded, ‘Maybe,’ but a lot of folks already live in the neighborhood. We need more of not just institutional engagement with the community; we need personal engagement with the community.”
