Angela Yee opens The Alex, a renovated apartment building in Detroit’s Midtown
The 30-unit building isn’t the only thing the popular radio host has brewing in the Motor City
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On a recent Saturday, Angela Yee is sitting inside of Cred Cafe in Detroit’s East Rivertown, trading smiles and laughs with friends and fans.
The cafe was opened by Detroit brothers and former NBA players Joe and Jordan Crawford in 2023 and has sourced Yee’s Coffee Uplifts People (CUP) brand since its inception.
“I love that it’s here because this is totally our vibe… the service here is amazing, I love the speakeasy in the back,” she says between sips of coffee. “It just speaks to everything I enjoy.”
Yee, a native of Brooklyn, New York, is known mostly to the world as the host of the syndicated radio show Way Up With Angela Yee and previously The Breakfast Club, the influential talk show where she sat alongside DJ Envy and Charlamagne tha God for 13 years, discussing hip-hop, politics, and dating until she departed in 2022.
She’s also an honorary Detroiter. Yee says the more she visited the Motor City, the more she loved it here. And CUP is not Yee’s only endeavor in Detroit.
In 2023, Yee purchased a 30-unit apartment building on 667 W. Alexandrine St. in Midtown.
Dubbed The Alex, the apartment opened its doors on Friday.
For the project, Yee partnered Ladies of Hope Ministries founder Dr. Topeka K. Sam, who reserved 10 of the units for formerly incarcerated women.
“People deserve a second chance,” Yee says. “A lot of these women are non-violent offenders. … Being mission-driven was important to me because I’m moving into that space where I want to start doing things that mean something to me and that people are grateful to have.”
She says Detroit has become a second home, and adds that she’s fallen in love with the city and the residents here.
“I like seeing people that moved from Detroit and have moved back,” she says. “I think it’s amazing to see all the people that are coming back to Detroit. I understand gentrification so much because I’m from Brooklyn, and I know what that looks like in New York.”
Yee says her entrepreneurial and creative spirit came to life in recent years, when the world shut down during the pandemic in 2020.
“I’ve never had a lot of time to just walk around in my neighborhood, and so that was the best time to come up with ideas and things,” she says.
The result was CUP, a coffee brand in which Yee was not only financially motivated, but inspired by the role coffee has played within the Black diaspora.
“Coffee is the number two import in the United States after oil and it’s something that’s not going anywhere,” she says. “It’s also something that was started in Ethiopia — that’s where coffee comes from, and I feel like in the United States coffee doesn’t get the promotion with our people that it deserves.”
Initially Yee’s focus was to make CUP a coffee brand that would be sold online and in grocery stores. But she decided to open a cafe by the same name in 2022 in Brooklyn, and the coffee made its way to downtown Detroit’s Central Kitchen + Bar shortly after.
Yee is not just an investor or someone using her name to promote the coffee brand — she takes pride that she’s committed herself to the entire coffee-making process and business.
“It’s a very high-quality coffee,” Yee says. “We deal directly with the farms, we have our own importer, a woman named Phyllis Johnson. She’s a Black woman who’s been working in the coffee industry for 30 years. And we roast the beans ourselves in Brooklyn.”
The business has not been without challenges: most notably, the current political climate has affected the cost of production.
“The prices keep fluctuating,” she says. “You never want to pass that cost down to the consumer and I feel like it’s scary when things are happening that are out of our control when it comes to tariffs, when it comes to a lot of different things when you think about importing.”
Yee’s overall goal is to get CUP into more places of business and increase her retail reach. “We are trying to make sure we show up in places that we go to and that we enjoy,” she says.
Yee’s equally excited by both CUP and The Alex being woven into Detroit’s creative and commercial fabric. She says she doesn’t plan on starting another endeavor in Detroit until she gets a better grasp on the first two.
The Alex renovation took a bit longer than Yee expected as she’s experienced the same ups and downs that financing any major restoration project comes with. There have been broken windows and parts of the building needed more repairs than previously thought.
“I didn’t get any grants,” Yee says. “We fully renovated the building so everything is brand new — the flooring, the walls, the appliances. We want to make it some place where I’m not just trying to make money, but I want it to be nice.”
She adds, “My name is on it.”
