Mayor Dave Bing Defaults On City Loan And Leaves Major Eyesore For City To Clean Up
In 2007, the automotive supply business owned by Detroit Mayor Dave Bing began to implode. Dave Bing had a great idea to save himself from financial ruin. He was going to get a group of investors together and build high-priced condos on the Detroit River overlooking Canada.
The City of Detroit was under the reign of now-convicted criminal Kwame Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick liked the idea and gave Bing and his partners a construction loan for $700,000. Sounds good, right? Well not exactly. It turns out Bing was either living in Bizarro World or was just clueless.
Major mortgage lenders like Countrywide Financial were going bust and property values in Detroit were plummeting.
Bing obviously slept through the alarm bells and klaxons going off on Wall Street.
Naturally, Bing’s company, Watermark Development fell apart. The $700,000 loan went unpaid and the abandoned building is now home to crack addicts, crack whores and skanky prostitutes. The whole affair was brushed under the carpet by a population and a city government consumed by the sorry tale of Kwame Kilpatrick.
Somehow in a city suffering from corruption news burnout, they didn’t want to hear about Mayor Dave Bing and his failed businesses. Instead, they looked at him like he was Grandad from The Boondocks and twice elected him mayor. That was until Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Charlie LeDuff did a segment about it the other day.
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