Oren Goldenberg
Community Builder
Oren Goldenberg is an active community builder in Detroit. His work ranges from feature films to complex real estate developments, creating new rituals to free dance parties. He focuses on building sustainable platforms for artists and residents of Detroit. Goldenberg is the developer and co-owner of Dreamtroit, a $30 million mixed-use artist-led affordable housing project in the Northwest Goldberg neighborhood of Detroit. Goldenberg has also spent the past 15 years revitalizing the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue, the last synagogue in Detroit. Since 2009, Goldenberg has operated Cass Corridor Films, a film production company by and for the residents of Detroit. Goldenberg is a 2013 Kresge Fellow in the Visual Arts, Best Filmmaker (Real Detroit, 2011), Best Michigan Filmmaker (AAFF, 2006), Michigan Historic Preservation Network Tax Credit Award recipient (2024) and sits on the board of the Downtown Synagogue and Make Art Work 501(c)3. Learn more about Goldenberg here and read about his work in the New York Times and Hyperallergic.
Articles
Blog
Inhabiting Impermanence for Sukkot
Oren Goldenberg is the developer and co-owner of the newly opened Dreamtroit, a $30 million mixed-use artist-led affordable housing project in the historic Lincoln Motor Factory in Detroit. For Sukkot, he ponders the connection between affordable housing and the temporary shelters we build every year to remember the time Jews wandered in the desert. The sukkot we as Jews inhabited in the desert were temporary shelters to protect us on the way to a promised land. They were dwellings for the upwardly mobile, an impermanent solution to get us to where we were trying to go; the first affordable public housing projects, if you will. But Affordable housing can no longer be equated with temporary housing. We are finding that people, over generations, require subsidies and assistance to be adequately housed in America. Affordable housing is the promised land, Goldenberg asserts. Read more here.