Who says you can’t go home?
the redux
One year ago, I returned to Detroit to attend Crain’s Detroit Homecoming, an immersive 3-day program designed for ex-pats highlighting Detroit’s revitalization.
You see, I’d left Detroit in 2008, just four short years after getting married and buying my first home. My husband and I were looking forward to raising our family and nurturing our careers, but the Great Recession had other plans.
The value of our home plummeted. The “good job” my husband had was lost to budget cuts, and the one that replaced it also took the brunt of the economic downturn.
So there we were: new home, new baby, no job, and no signs of things changing. We made a fateful decision. We packed up our things, said goodbye to our families, and moved ‘down South.’
Fast forward a few years. My family is thriving, my daughter is growing into a loving person, my husband has a lucrative career, and I’m living a few dreams of my own as an adjunct lecturer, marketing & PR professional, and political consultant. On paper, everything seems fine. But something isn’t quite right.
We enjoy our vacations in the mountains and at the beach, but holidays are becoming lonely. Those phone calls to friends become few and far between and visits with them are squeezed onto street corners as we ensure we see everyone on our short trips back.
Then the unthinkable happened — at least for the grandparents. We had another child and they wouldn’t have the opportunity to see him grow up. They laid the guilt on thick. And I had to admit: they were right.
In 2014 I visited Detroit with fresh eyes. I was in town for Netroots Nation. I didn’t want to come back and it was hard to even book that flight. You see, one thing I forgot to mention was that a few mere months after leaving the city, my grandmother was assaulted in her home (assailants still at large) and left for dead. She suffered a stroke and her health slowly declined until her death the following year. How could the city that gave me so much take my grandmother away from me?
At the time, I saw that as a sign of having made the correct decision. I didn’t realize that my attempt to grieve for my grandmother was muddled with need to grieve for my city.
But back to Netroots.
The event took place in downtown. I made a few snide comments about returning to anyone who’d listen. I even wrote a piece about my disdain for Detroit on TWIB. I proudly declared: “I love Detroit, but I don’t like her.”
So that was it. I came to town for a few days, got back on my plane and went home. Easy peasy, so I thought…
While in Detroit, I reconnected with a former resident who’d just moved back. An accomplished writer and artist, dream hampton could live anywhere she desired but she decided to come back home. And that intrigued me.
A few weeks later we spoke briefly about her decision and I hung up the phone thinking: what if?
Now I can’t tell my husband I was thinking about moving back home right? I mean, it’d only been 6 years since we left. His career was going great, mine even better. The kids were thriving and they had lives of their own. We can’t leave right?
I spent the next two years watering a seed of ‘what if?’
I answered that question when I returned for Homecoming. The city previously mired in muck was now to forward-thinking. After leaving bankruptcy, she decided that the Detroit of tomorrow would be disruptive. It would embrace technology and urban farming. It would rebuild in 20-minute communities. It would become smart and strategic about its future. And it would need everyone who loves it to pitch in.
Yes, Detroit was the same city that I’d said goodbye to my grandmother in, but she was also the same city that raised me, educated me, made me the woman and entrepreneur that I am today. When I think about building my future, I think about building it in a community that needs me just as much as I need it.
Detroit is big enough to matter in the world but small enough for you to matter in it.
I’m proud to say that I back home. In Detroit. The city of the future.

I’ll be chronicling my return via Medium posts and photojournals.
There won’t always be a cheerleading session — lord knows that I did not come back for that. But I did come back to build. To build the city that I want to see. To build the generational wealth that is needed for my family. But most of all, I came to build the best version of myself.
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Hi, I’m Jenifer. I’m an award-winning, accredited brand strategist and the founder & managing director of culturally intelligent #stockphoto marketplace Colorstock. I’m a polymath born, raised, and educated in Detroit. #WhatUpDoe?
