Representatives of Dan Gilbert’s real estate firm made a forceful pitch for their $1.6 billion Renaissance Center redevelopment plan at the proposal’s second community meeting on Sept. 1 and shot down alternative ideas as impractical.
The Bedrock representatives offered new details during the Tuesday night meeting on how they and their development partner on the project, General Motors, settled on a plan to demolish two of the five original 1970s RenCen towers and convert the remaining towers into a mix of hotel, residential and office space.
Two weeks earlier, during the first meeting regarding the project’s Community Benefits, several Detroit residents who spoke had pointed questions for the developers or voiced outright opposition to the plan.
“We heard you after the last meeting,” Steve Ogden, a Bedrock vice president, told the audience Tuesday night in the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center.
The Bedrock reps said they engaged with some of the nation’s top adaptive-reuse architects and most experienced contractors when coming up with their redevelopment plan.
The plan calls for demolishing the two 39-story office towers closest to the riverfront, plus the multistory concrete podium that currently connects all five towers. The remaining towers — including the 72-story center tower that is now a Marriott — would then be converted into a mix of housing, hotel rooms and modernized office space.
The plan also calls for building a major new riverfront public park and amenity-filled attraction in front of and to the east of the remaining towers, coming at a to-be-determined extra cost beyond the $1.6 billion.
Jake Chidester, vice president of strategic initiatives for Bedrock, told the audience that their plan is superior to three possible alternatives for the nearly-vacant Renaissance Center that some residents suggested.
- Doing nothing and just waiting for someone, someday to come along and save the RenCen, similar to what Ford Motor Co. did with Michigan Central Station.
- Attempting to refill all four office towers with office tenants.
- Saving the two riverfront office towers from demolition and converting them to residential.
Chidester said the first option, doing nothing and waiting, would leave a massive vacancy on the downtown skyline for many years and possibly decades.
“Now Michigan Central is a fantastic success story,” he said. “But let’s not forget that Michigan Central sat vacant for 35 years — the heart of Corktown and southwest — before it was revamped.”
Refilling the RenCen with office tenants isn’t practical, Chidester said, as metro Detroit is presently awash with empty office space and will likely remain so for a long time.
“There is just no projected demand for 2.7 million square feet of office space, today or forever” he said, referring to the RenCen’s total office space inventory.
Finally, converting the two 39-story riverfront towers to housing would be cost prohibitive, he said, with an estimated price tag of $400 million per tower or $800 million for both.
The conversion is especially challenging and expensive because of the towers’ unique octagonal size and the original office floorplates that need massive HVAC and plumbing retrofits to be apartments.
Even if converting all four towers to apartments was financially feasible, Chidester said, it could take up to 10 years to fill all those new apartments. (The conversion of just Tower 100 to apartments, which is part of the Bedrock and GM plan, is expected to create about 380 new apartments.)
“It will take about three years to lease up 400 units per tower,” he said. “If you multiply that across four towers, it will take over a decade to fill up these buildings.
“Which is fine, but it will be difficult to attract a grocery store, a CVS, services, to a complex that is empty for over a decade. And in doing so, we would have created a different version of the same thing that we’re trying to solve here.”
He later added, “We believe we have a path forward — the only path forward for the Renaissance Center to position this icon for the next 100 years of use.”
More balanced public comments
There was a greater balance of critics and proponents of the Bedrock/GM plan at Tuesday’s meeting than at the first Community Benefits meeting on Aug. 18, when the majority of those who spoke were critical of plans.
Detroit resident Francois Moore said he celebrated his 54th birthday this week at the Highlands Detroit restaurant on the uppermost floor of the RenCen and was taken back by the desolation he saw throughout the complex. He said he supports the proposed redevelopment so that future generations will have a Renaissance Center to visit and enjoy.
“At one point in time it was thriving, but right now, it’s a ghost town,” he said.
But resident Scotty Boman, who lives on the east side, criticized the plan for eliminating what had been enclosed and publicly accessible space in the RenCen’s podium to create new outdoor space, saying that Detroiters won’t be using that outdoor space during cold weather.
He also questioned the need to create such space, when the Detroit Riverwalk is there right now.
“We already have outdoor community space there, all along the riverfront,” Bowman said.
Next steps
The Community Benefits process is expected to continue with weekly meetings until late October. At the Sept. 15 meeting, Bedrock and GM are expected to reveal what tax breaks and development incentives they intend to seek from Detroit City Council.
Tuesday’s meeting included a vote by attendees for two neighborhood representatives to serve on the nine-member Neighborhood Advisory Committee, which will negotiate with the developers for a Community Benefits agreement. The two representatives will be Teron Haynes Jr. and Gail Perry-Mason.
The other seven NAC members are to be chosen by city council and the Detroit Planning and Development Department.
GM and Bedrock have said that they wish to be underway with the RenCen redevelopment project by next summer.
Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on X @jcreindl