New details emerged Tuesday night as to the latest timeline for the 10-project, $1.5 billion District Detroit megadevelopment, which has fallen behind its original construction schedule.
The 10 planned new buildings and building rehabs, being codeveloped by New York-based The Related Cos. and the Ilitch organization’s Olympia Development of Michigan, were to start breaking ground in mid-2023, although work has yet to begin and a new sequencing order for the projects was announced last March.
During an annual meeting Tuesday on District Detroit’s progress on its community benefits agreement, Olympia Development President Keith Bradford gave updates about the first three projects of the 10 that are planned.
He said the first project will be a 18-story, 261-unit residential building at 2205 Cass, near the forthcoming University of Michigan Center for Innovation, a U-M academic building.
That new building needs to break ground sometime next year, he said, to be ready to house students who will attend the UMCI, which is expected to open in time for the 2027 fall semester.
The second District Detroit building will be a 14-story, 290-room hotel to be built next to Little Caesars Arena. Discussions are well underway with a potential hotel brand operator, Bradford said, and an official announcement as to the operator could happen in the coming months.
Asked about the hotel’s timeline, he said, “Ideally I would love to break ground by the end of ’25, but we’ll see where things go.”
Next in the lineup would be the adaptive reuse of the existing 10-story Fox Theatre office building, 2211 Woodward, to become a 177-room hotel. The timeline for this second hotel is roughly six months behind that of the LCA hotel, Bradford said, and interviews with potential hotel operators are already happening.
The University of Michigan Center for Innovation had its groundbreaking last December and is separate from the District Detroit development, but closely related, as The Related Cos. and Olympia anticipate the UMCI creating future demand for some of District Detroit’s planned office space projects.
A 17-story office tower at 2200 Woodward, next to Comerica Park, was originally planned as the first District Detroit building, but the developers postponed the project because of the challenging post-pandemic lending environment for new office space.
District Detroit was given a late March 2025 deadline to break ground on at least one of the 10 projects, based on rules for the development’s largest development incentive — a $615 million, 35-year tax capture known as a Transformational Brownfield. Specifically, construction is required to start within two years of Detroit City Council’s March 28, 2023 approval of the brownfield.
EMEA Tribune is not involved in this news article, it is taken from our partners and or from the News Agencies. Copyright and Credit go to the News Agencies, email news@emeatribune.com Follow our WhatsApp verified Channel
