Art Explodes on South Division Avenue

GRAND RAPIDS - Now that a high-tech life sciences corridor is booming on this city's east side, its leaders are turning their attention back to the arts, which are already transforming a once seedy thoroughfare on the city's south side into the new Avenue for the Arts.

This past spring developers began a $7.5 million renovation project that has transformed four vacant, decrepit buildings on gritty South Division Avenue into low-rent living and working spaces geared specifically to artists. The project, the Division-Oakes Arts Initiative, has intensified the ongoing rejuvenation of the city’s historic Heartside District by adding 23 affordable loft apartments and some 15,000 square feet of studio, gallery, and other retail business space.

Read the rest of this article by Michigan Land Use Institute's super-reporter Andy Guy, GR's Skid Row Renaissance