Show The City Some Love

At the heart of everything -- especially a city as complex, tortured, and promising as Detroit -- are stories: Big stories that explain smaller ones, and small stories that turn into big ones, all of them folding in and out of themselves and taking you as close as you can get to the really important things. Detroit's story over the last 100 years began so well -- Ford and Fisher, mass production and union organizing -- and then headed south: Road building and riots, white flight and poverty, and acres of abandoned lots.

Lately, Detroit's story is decidedly more assuring. Which brings us to Kelli Kavanaugh, a young, pretty, single engineer and writer whose small story of urban accomplishment reflects the unfolding drama of city grit and genuine optimism that is blossoming in Detroit... Ms. Kavanaugh and the growing ranks of other agile, tough, reform-minded, and resilient young adults, white and black, who are living and working in Detroit are helping to make that happen.