. .
Left: Marty and Ilene
Abrin's new home on
Talbot is among
newer, larger homes
being built on lots
in Oak Park.
,
,
,„„„
Right:
This new entrance
enhances the
expanded
Young Israel
of Oak Park.
, •„„„ , „‘„,„„ ,
k*.
Opposite page:
Kevin Feber
oversees
the move.
Inset:
Lisa and Kevin Feber
in front of their new
Oak Park home.
Congregation Beth Shalom — the Reform and
Conservative presences in Oak Park. Each synagogue
spent about $2 million on recent renovations. Beth
Shalom is poised to celebrate its 50th anniversary in
2004. Emanu-El, which will mark 50 years in 2002,
has among the larger Jewish preschools and summer
day camps in the community.
Real Estate Boom
In the history of Jewish Detroit, nowhere have Jews
stayed as long as they have in Oak Park, which Jews
first called home in large numbers in the 1950s.
Incorporated as a city in 1945, Oak Park was a
rural community that blossomed as Jews left
Detroit's Dexter-Davison neighborhood. Like its
downtown predecessors, the Jewish hamlet was
threatened when Interstate 696 was proposed, but
Jews uniting across the spectrum of observance kept
the city from being divided thanks to special freeway
decking that, in fact, replenished its Jewish presence.
The unlikely coalition of neighborhood shuls, city
leaders and community activists convinced highway
officials to build three overpass decks and con-
tributed toward new housing for uprooted seniors.
The byproduct was that observant Jews could walk
, safely to shul, their neighborhood could remain visu-
ally pleasing and older folks, who were the soul of
the community, could stay put.
Today, Reform and Conservative singles and fami-
lies, as well as Orthodox families, vie for properties
whose values have risen at an incredible rate.
According to the Southeastern Michigan Council
of Governments, the most recent data shows that
property values in Oak Park rose 144 percent
between 1980 and 1990, while comparable data for
Commerce Township, an increasingly popular resi-
dential spot for Jews, reported a 6.8 percent rise in
housing values.
In 1980, the median housing value for an Oak
Park home was $63,924; in 1990, it was $156,000.
For the same period, Commerce Township homes
went from a median value of $99,931 in 1980 to
$106,800 in 1990.
Ruth Levi, a real estate agent with Century 21 in
Bingham Farms, says rising prices have made
Huntington Woods "inaccessible" for many young cou-
ples, so they're "coming across the border" to Oak Park.
Compared with the west-end of the city, the east-
side of Oak Park has Huntington Woods-style bun-
galows. North Oak Park homes are included in the
Berkley school district; south Oak Park homes are in
HOT PROPERTY
M
anion Freedman always begins her
Neighborhood Project presentations
like this:
"My.mother grew up in a Jewish neighbor-
hood on Hastings Street, and then on
Montcalm, and I never saw them.
"I grew up- in a Jewish neighborhood, north-
west Detroit, that my children never saw. The
neighborhoods [had] a short lifespan of 20,
maybe 25 years.
I
"Unless there was some intervention, the
Oak Park and Southfield of the '60s would be
gone by the '90s."
Freedman joined the Jewish Federation of
Metropolitan Detroit's Neighborhood Project
in 1988, and became its director in late 1995.
She now is poised to become a senior planning
associate in the
Federation's plan- .
4iNANIRMIS
ning department
this summer. There,
she will oversee the
education division
and the Max M.
Fisher Jewish
Community
Foundation.
Assistant Director
Amy Neistein will
slide into
Freedman's position.
Freedman came to
the Neighborhood
Project as a master's
of social work stu-
dent from the
Marion Freedman
University of
Michigan in 1987,
majoring in administration.
I
"I knew the history of abandoned neighbor-
hoods in Detroit," she says. "It was exciting to
work with a program that would attempt to
reverse that pattern."
Freedman takes pride in "watching young peo-
ple returning to the neighborhoods of their
birth, something that didn't happen in the past."
Freedman and her psychiatrist husband,
Michael, live in West Bloomfield. They previ-
ously lived in Oak Park for nine years. They
have three adult children. Sons Jeffrey and
Steven live in Los Angeles; daughter Laura lives
in Huntington Woods.
— Lynne Schreiber
on page 16
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