Say a final goodbye to shuttered Lakeside Mall in Sterling Heights, which has a little over six months before the walls could start crumbling down.
The Miami-based company that bought the 1970s shopping mall in 2019 — before its eventual closure in summer 2024 — says it anticipates starting demolition of the 1.5 million-square-foot mall sometime early next year.
The company, a real estate subsidiary of investment firm Lionheart Capital, isn’t giving any precise estimates yet for how long the demolition process would take. But it could take up to a year to finish, according to Colin Carby, the firm’s director of development.
And once Lakeside Mall is completely down, construction would begin on Phase 1 of the 105-acre site’s ambitious redevelopment: Lakeside Town Center.
The project’s $621 million initial phase would build a residential and commercial development that, according to planning documents, would take about five years to completely finish once mall demo has begun. The demolition wouldn’t touch the still-open JC Penney department store or the empty Sears building.
The future Lakeside Town Center would feature:
“It’s a large-scale, mixed-used project with a lot of complexity,” Carby said.
The developer was awarded a key incentive for the project earlier this week when the quasi-public Michigan Strategic Fund in Lansing approved it for a Transformational Brownfield. The incentive will redirect to the developer various streams of new local and state taxes — up to $271 million — that get generated at the development site over a period of 35 years.
“This money is not coming from the state’s general fund; it’s not coming from the city’s general fund,” said Sterling Heights City Manager Mark Vanderpool. “This is taxes that are captured from the new venues on this particular development.”
The first phase of the project is expected to create 478 permanent jobs and 3,419 construction jobs.
To support the project, the city plans to issue $27.6 million in bonds to build site infrastructure. Later on, the developer is to convey 14 acres of the site to the city.
There is no anticipated starting date yet for the project’s second phase. Tentative plans for Phase 2 call for an additional 1,166 units of housing to be built, a 120-room hotel, a community center, 70,000 square feet of office space and an additional 19,000 square feet of retail.
“It’s impressive that a developer is going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, not only in the city but the state of Michigan,” Vanderpool said.
The old Lakeside Mall was developed by shopping mall titan A. Alfred Taubman and opened in March 2, 1976. It originally had 76 stores, including anchors JC Penney, Sears, Crowley’s and J.L. Hudson, and grew to as many as 175 stores in the 1980s.
The site is situated along Hall Road in one of the busiest retail corridors in the state. The Mall at Partridge Creek, an open-air shopping center, is just a few miles east in Clinton Township and is widely believed to have lured shoppers away from Lakeside Mall once it opened in 2007.
Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on X @jcreindl
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: New details on demolition plan for Lakeside Mall in Sterling Heights
Reporting by JC Reindl, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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By JC Reindl, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
