Instead of a parking lot, there would be a gleaming new 17-story office tower next to Comerica Park.
Next door, a 20-story apartment building with bird’s-eye views into the baseball stadium would be in its final stretch of construction.
And Detroit’s mayor would be ready to cut the ribbon on a 14-story hotel next to Little Caesars Arena.
Those are a few of the 10 projects in the District Detroit development — a joint development by the Ilitch organization’s Olympia Development of Michigan and its New York-based partner, The Related Companies — that Detroit City Council approved three years ago.
Had the development been built according to how it was publicly pitched and planned, eight of the 10 projects would be underway or completed by now. So far, however, construction has begun on only one; the others exist only on paper.
The developers have since emphasized that the timelines set out in the original plan were only estimates. Yet those timelines remain the basis for what is currently a spring 2028 deadline for work to at least be started on all the projects.
For now, the developers are staying tight-lipped about when they expect work to begin on the nine projects still to go.
Some critics are already drawing comparisons between the slow progress on District Detroit and the letdown that followed the opening of Little Caesars Arena nearly a decade ago, when only portions of a much-anticipated commercial district surrounding the arena got built.
“We’re not surprised and I think most Detroiters aren’t surprised, because this is almost like a rerun,” said Theo Pride, an organizer for the Detroit People’s Platform, which was critical of the development incentives awarded to District Detroit.
City council approved District Detroit by a nearly unanimous vote in March 2023, which unlocked a key development incentive: a tax capture subsidy, known as a Transformational Brownfield, with a $615 million value for the developers over 35 years.
Leading up to Little Caesars Arena’s fall 2017 opening, Olympia Development had released renderings that depicted a 50-block entertainment and residential district sprouting up around the new arena, complete with five new neighborhoods, plentiful street-level retail and hundreds of apartments.
But only a portion of the district that appeared in the early renderings was built.
Public criticism gathered steam in 2019 after HBO ran a highly critical segment about the lack of visible progress on the arena district. While the geographic area around the arena was then, and continues to be, branded as District Detroit, that 2010s arena district project was different from the 2023 District Detroit development.
Another difference between the early arena district project and the more recent District Detroit is that The Related Cos. only became a partner of Olympia Development’s for the 2023 development.
The Related Cos.’ founder and chairman, Stephen Ross, is a native of Detroit who has been outspoken about his support for the city and desire to see it grow.
“Like many developments nationwide, persistently challenging financing conditions have impacted the originally projected development timeline,” District Detroit said in a statement for this article. “However, we remain committed to continuing to meet all of our Community Benefit Agreement obligations and we have not received any public funds to date.”
The statement said they are currently in predevelopment for two of the remaining nine District Detroit projects. However, it did not identify which two projects or give a timeline.
The sole “no” vote among city council members in 2023 for the District Detroit development came from Mary Sheffield, who was council president at the time. In January, she became Detroit’s new mayor.
When explaining her opposition, Sheffield at the time said she could no longer support “business as usual” after seeing past big development deals in Detroit do little to stop the city’s population loss, the closure of Black-owned businesses or the “exclusion” of Detroiters from ownership and equity.
The mayor’s office had no comment for this article.
Heavy on office space
One aspect of the 2023 District Detroit that Detroit People’s Platform found perplexing, Pride said, was the large amount of office space in the plan at a time when demand for office space appeared to be declining in Detroit and other cities after the pandemic.
“The development they were proposing didn’t make sense on its face, considering the market conditions of downtown areas,” Pride said.
Three of the 10 projects would add about 1.2 million square feet of new office space, an amount roughly equivalent to building two more Renaissance Center towers.
Deadline approaching
Time is ticking for Olympia Development and The Related Cos.
Under a complex agreement with local and state development officials regarding District Detroit’s Transformational Brownfield incentive, the developers appear to have until April 2028 to have either started construction on all 10 District Detroit projects, or have the Brownfield yanked away for the projects that haven’t begun.
That construction start deadline is specifically the five-year anniversary of the quasi-public Michigan Strategic Fund in Lansing having followed city council’s lead and signed off on the project.
Yet the deadline isn’t necessarily an absolutely final one. Development officials can potentially grant multiple deadline extensions for construction to begin, according to a copy of the agreement reviewed by the Detroit Free Press.
A spokesperson for the Detroit Brownfield Redevelopment Authority told the Free Press earlier this month the authority had not received any requests so far from the developers for deadline extensions.
The Transformational Brownfield program is not a type of subsidy that grants upfront money. Instead, it redirects to developers the various streams of new local and state taxes that get generated at a development site over a period of decades. So if no projects get built, there is no revenue for developers to get.
1 project so far
The one District Detroit project where construction is underway is a 13-story and 313-unit apartment complex at 2205 Cass Ave. that will house graduate students and faculty for the future University of Michigan Center for Innovation in downtown.
Known as Founders House, Ross and Chris Ilitch helped break ground for the project in April. It is expected to be done and open in 2028.
The project was originally planned as generally housing with about 20% of its apartments as “affordable” units that would accept Section 8 housing vouchers. Last year, the Michigan Strategic Fund granted the developers’ request to exempt the project from that affordable housing requirement — so long as the affordable units that would have gone in the building get shifted to other District Detroit projects.
The University of Michigan Center for Innovation is an academic research campus that is a separate development and not one of the 10 District Detroit projects. Its $250 million cost is coming from $100 million in state funds, a $100 million donation by Ross and the rest from U-M fundraising.
Sequencing changes
In early 2024, the District Detroit developers announced a change in their anticipated sequencing for the 10 projects. Under the new sequencing, the developers said, some of the housing and hotel projects would come before the new office buildings.
Olympia Development President Keith Bradford gave another update last December during an annual public meeting about progress on District Detroit’s Community Benefits agreement.
After Founders House, he said, two other projects that will move forward are a new 290-room hotel next to Little Caesars Arena and redevelopment of the long-empty Fort Wayne/American hotel, 408 Temple St., near the Masonic Temple, into a 149-unit apartment building.
He didn’t share any timeline for those projects, but said that could come in the near future.
The 10 projects in District Detroit and timeline
Source: The official Transformational Brownfield “Reimbursement Agreement” between the District Detroit developers, the Michigan Strategic Fund, the Detroit Brownfield Redevelopment Authority and the Michigan Department of Treasury, dated Nov. 1, 2023.
Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on X @jcreindl
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 3 years after approval, only 1 District Detroit project is underway
Reporting by JC Reindl, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By JC Reindl, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
