Detroit needs a transformational projects action plan for the Renaissance Center, the adjoining waterfront and business district, and transit
A few months back, the Dan Gilbert owned Bedrock Realty and GM announced a proposal to redo in part the Renaissance Center, nominally GM's headquarters. GM agreed to move to a building to be constructed on the Hudson's Department Store site--but renting little space comparatively--and the two agreed to jointly redevelop RenCen ("GM and Bedrock reveal master plan for John Portman’s Renaissance Center by Gensler and Field Operations," Architect's Newspaper).
RenCen is one of many failed post 1960s how to reverse urban decline projects that were done across the country.
Anti-urban design. RenCen by John Portman who designed similar projects in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, was pushed by the New Detroit city business promotion organization. Ford Motor agreed to build it and put their headquarters there (("Free Press Flashback: Detroit's Renaissance Center opens to champagne, hope in 1977," DFP), Will Detroit Ever Fully Recover From John Portman’s Renaissance Center?," Common Edge). From the article:
These projects also set dangerous precedents, providing a formula for both developers and city officials, desperate to revive their sagging downtowns. Called public-private partnerships, they were in fact publicly subsidized private developments. The Portman projects, no doubt, made for dramatic photos (some still look dazzling today on architecture blogs), but often were dreadful urban places.
Worse still, rather than revive their intended downtowns, they were often impediments to it. And for good reason: excessive demolition of declining urban fabric, and its large-scale replacement with a single-use never regenerates a city. It simply replaces a multitude of uses with a single, often sterile, one. The same is true for so-called “shrinking cities,” where far too many perfectly viable buildings were demolished. Massive demolitions have never stemmed the shrinking; in fact, they exacerbated the problem. The wiser and far cheaper strategy would have been to invest on the neighborhood level in stemming the shrinkage.
A key element of the design is that it is a fortress that says f.u. to the city. It's built on a podium that acts as a fortified wall against the rest of the city, rather than a permeable complex that connects to and extends the city.
A good comparison would be Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.
Because it's so big, it's not perfectly permeable either, but there are sections designed to be public facing, such as the skating rink, shopping, the Radio City Music Hall, etc., so that it doesn't function like a railyard, cutting off the city. And it's part of the urban fabric, not apart from it.
RenCen is the railyard or freeway of the Detroit waterfront. Over the years, Ford left and GM took over, and various initiatives have promoted waterfront development.
Separately, in the central business district there have been various actors--note that Dan Gilbert isn't the first--bringing corporate headquarters to the city (Karmanos, Compuware), a casino (Illitch) and new sports facilities (Illitch and the Ford Family wrt the Lions football team), etc.
But overall, the tri-county region of Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb hasn't grown much over the past 50 years--the Detroit area is the most exurbanized of metropolitan areas, what I joke about is that is the endpoint that automobile manufacturers wanted, in order to maximize sales they needed to diminish the value of exchange, transit, and the center city.
The Detroit area as a weak real estate market. Lack of population growth makes it hard to attract new residents to the city, and keeps property values low, making it hard to reinvest.
An interesting article in Crain's about "the inner suburbs" makes an indirect point about the "old housing stock." It's not up to the expectations of the current marketplace, and the cost to rehabilitate properties may be greater than the resale amount (a conundrum faced by historic preservationists in weak market cities). [We argue about house flippers--most do a bad job. But houses do need to be refreshed every few decades. Just not badly.]
A new plan by Gensler’s Detroit office and Field Operations would tear down two of General Motor Renaissance Center’s original towers and replace them with three new smaller ones filled with “a mix of hospitality and housing.” (Courtesy Bedrock and Gensler)
More talk about the benefits. Facing pushback, and not having a well developed plan, the proposal has modified ("GM promises any return it gets on RenCen renovation will go to Detroit education," DFP). According to "Renaissance Center Future: GM and Bedrock want to turn site into 'truly public infrastructure'," (Fox2):
- General Motors and Bedrock want to knock down two towers and convert the Renaissance Center into a combination of housing, hotel units, and office space
- Tower 300 and Tower 400 on the Northeast and Southeast corners, respectively, will be knocked down. The central tower will be converted into a hotel with 200 apartments at the top Tower 100 on the southwest side will be converted into 400 apartments that include mixed-income and affordable units Tower 200 will remain an office tower
- It also wants to remove the wall and podium surrounding the complex, build up a new park, and connect downtown to the riverfront
- The $1.6 billion project needs public funding, including $250 million from the state and $100 million from Detroit.
Having lived in Detroit off and on when I was young, then the suburbs, then Ann Arbor, I have always maintained an interest in the city's success or failure. One of my realizations is that I can't judge and evaluate new proposals on the basis of what I remembered the city was like in the 1960s--it was declining, but we didn't know. Downtown was busy, there were 1.8 million residents. Lots of retail. Parks, etc. We walked to neighborhood schools. Supermarkets (Wrigleys, Packer I remember the most) promoted their weekly specials through circulars they'd post door to door. Other department stores, including local neighborhood stores, besides Hudson's.
Proposals today should be evaluated in terms of today's conditions.
A comprehensive revitalization plan is required, not a bunch of disconnected developer-driven initiatives. Reading a bunch of articles this weekend in Crain's Detroit Business, plus paying attention to the ongoing RenCen coverage in the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press (which I used to deliver in the 1970s!), especially the News column ("Why GM's Renaissance Center could become as obsolete as the Packard Plant") which suggests the waterfront could become like Chicago's Navy Pier or San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, not recognizing those developments are not simple and require constant investment to remain relevant makes me realize that the RenCen-waterfront "planning" "process" is disjoint, developer led, and not likely to gain extranormal economic benefits, because of lack of coordination between the opportunities of
- redevelopment of RenCen
- new cultural development along the waterfront,
- more redevelopment in the adjacent business district development
- working to connect to the sports-centered District Detroit that is not quite midtown (my father's dental office is now a parking lot...),
- transit redevelopment and expansion and
- more programs for resident attraction.
- the Detroit-Ann Arbor Innovation corridor proposal ("Detroit-Ann Arbor link vital to future of Michigan's tech economy," Crain's Detroit Business)
- Belle Isle revitalization (a park in the river, now run by the state).
The Inner Harbor development sparked similar ventures world-wide ("On the Revitalized Waterfront: Creative Milieu for Creative Tourism," Sustainability Journal). For example, in Liverpool and to some extent, Hamburg.
Liverpool and their late 1990s/early 2000s economic development planning has been an important example to me in terms of how to approach multifaceted, visionary and successful urban revitalization on a large scale.
It was a foundational example for what I then called the six element program for best practice revitalization, which has since fed into what I now call "Transformational Projects Action Planning," where you harvest a number of anchor projects to move a wide scale revitalization program forward.
All hasn't been glorious ("Liverpool loses UNESCO World Heritage Site designation: An example of tough choices for cash strapped governments." 2021). But not resting on its laurels, there are plans afoot to update the planning wrt waterfront ("Future of Liverpool’s waterfront under the microscope ," Place North West), that sounds similar to the need for RenCen driven improvements along the waterfront and in the central business district. From the article:
The city council wants to appoint an expert team to draw up a plan to maximise the economic potential of the six-mile swathe of land fronting the Mersey, from Festival Gardens in the south to Bramley-Moore Dock in the north.
The 10 to 15-year strategic planning document will underpin future development along the waterfront, much of which is owned by Peel L&P, and knit together existing and proposed schemes. ... “This is an amazing opportunity and I hope the appointed team approaches the challenge with the imagination and verve befitting a world-class city,” said Cllr Nick Small, Liverpool’s cabinet member for city development.
“Such is its dynamic offer, Liverpool’s waterfront supports a huge chunk of our visitor, retail and commercial economies, supporting tens of thousands of jobs and we need to be just as mindful of how we shape its future as we are proud of its past.”
Also see "New plans for Liverpool waterfront regeneration submitted by developers," Independent.
Conclusion. I see the opportunities that a coordinated revitalization could provide to Detroit. But they aren't there yet.
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Some past writings on Detroit and the environs:
-- "The rise of Oakland County is built on Detroit's fall," 2014
-- "One more idea about Detroit: merging not with Wayne County but Oakland County," 2019
-- "Revisiting stories: the death of L. Brooks Patterson, County Executive, Oakland County, Michigan," 2019
-- "Michigan politics as an illustration of the impact of the decline of industry on social capital," 2020
-- "Pontiac Michigan: a lagging African American city in one of the nation's wealthiest counties," 2022
Labels: architecture, real estate development, rivers and waterfronts, Transformational Projects Action Planning, urban revitalization
posted by Richard Layman @ 4:30 AM&Permanent Link
7 Comments:
I don't know why or how, but your comment was deleted. I hadn't been on the computer, so I hadn't responded. But 'cause I read the articles I can at least restore the links:
https://tomforth.co.uk/whynorthenglandispoor/
Anyway, that is some deep s* provocative analysis of the north versus south economic disparities in England that has a lot of power.
I do think one thing missed is how manufacturing was in the north (still is, but also in the south) and that as the country post industrialized, the economy tanked, not unlike many Rust Best locales, and especially as manufacturing shifted from labor intensive to capital intensive.
The point about the universities is fascinating, and how the top of the North benefited from Scotland as a result.
What I learned back when I did the EU articles is in part the north's decline, specifically Liverpool, was how when the UK had to shift away from "The Atlantic"/the west, to Europe economically, Liverpool was supplanted because of location.
.... I don't know enough about Manchester.
And getting back to universities, (1) I was reminded of something I learned doing the article on Thessaloniki, that its economy declined because business decamped to Athens, because ultimately that's where decisions were being made. (2) but given all I write about the ability to leverage engineering schools, could the polytechnics have compensated some?
===
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n24/tom-crewe/the-strange-death-of-municipal-england
of course, I know about the centralization versus local issue with the government but really even so probably haven't fully grasped what was at stake.
Obviously, the House of Commons isn't the right vehicle to make bus route decisions for Sheffield. Certainly restricting taxation, cutting grants to local governments of as much as 67% ain't so great either.
Research on where the money went in Johnson's "leveling up" initiative found it mostly went to Tory areas.
So that's another issue, the Tories have been for decades deliberately disinvesting in the North.
(Which when I was reading the first cite, I was reminded of your point that the New Deal was in large part, reinvesting in the middle of the country, when previously capital was focused on and controlled by coastal institutions.)
SO in a way, while Thatcher was about austerity too, alongside neoliberalism, it came with a heightening of central government involvement, just at the expense of the local. I can see, England being so small, why people thought they could pull that off.
I also wonder if there had been states within England, would that have made a difference.
I thought it was dumb that Labour was against Metro Mayors because it was a Tory initiative.
And contemporarily, wow, I haven't been impressed so far by the Labour taking of the reins and the scale of what needs to be done there, and the miniscule response.
Also when I was reading I was thinking about the "core versus periphery" arguments of Wallerstein,
The author did use the term periphery at least once. But like the Athens versus Thessaloniki example, that's an issue.
40 years after reading that stuff, I think about it more on different scales. It was then positioned about the Global North or 1st World versus the Global South or third world.
But it functions similarly within the North and the South, and within countries.
I wonder if North England's problem in part derives from England just not being big enough.
In the US we have the core versus periphery arguments too. And with globalization and transportation costs, business seems to shift to areas with better transportation. Eg Caterpillar from Peoria to Suburban Chicago.
And the shift of businesses like Boeing is about core versus periphery, although Seattle being on the periphery originally may have been a benefit.
There's a lot to process.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/29/labour-rachel-reeves-growth-trickle-down-economics
There was a piece in the FT recently about "mid sized" countries being killed -- small countries and large ones are the one that are doing well.
In terms of promoting urban living, I've raised this before -- our congressional system is great at pushing out federal dollars to mid-sized cities, but isn't very well position to deal with larger metro areas.
Goes back to to argument made by Bob Crandall that airline regulation under the CAB was good for smaller cities, and that deregulation pushing for hub/spoke networks killed business HQ in smaller cities.
You've probably already read this. (I think whether has a bit to do with it. Also kind of Gerschenkronian advantages to move upward in development terms from more backwards positions.)
https://www.ft.com/content/7613b33f-f09e-4fad-a8c1-39dd11b662a9
The revenge of the Mediterranean
which links to
Reversal of fortunes: Europe’s thriving south and stagnant north
https://www.ft.com/content/3eaa4534-6593-467b-877b-3a18e0a30181
This is leading some economists to question whether the current growth is a sign of a more permanent shift or merely a short-term aberration. Commerzbank’s chief economist Jörg Krämer is “sceptical” that the “above-average development of the countries in the south of the monetary union will continue for much longer”, arguing that structural problems remain largely unresolved.But Christian Schulz, Euro area economist at Citi, says “the higher growth rates . . . are driven by real improvements”, pointing to years of below-average price and wage increases as well as some limited reforms of the labour market. “A 30 per cent disadvantage in unit labour costs that existed over the first decade of the currency union has been offset,” he adds.
The newfound economic fortunes of Europe’s debt crisis countries can in part be traced right back to Brussels itself: A €800bn debt-funded investment programme that the EU launched during the pandemic.Through the so-called NextGenerationEU, member states are being provided with funds to invest in transportation and digital infrastructure, green energy generation, research and development among other areas, in exchange for undertaking productivity-enhancing structural reforms.Portugal, Italy, Spain and Greece are the main recipients. Though the four countries account for just 28 per cent of the Euro area’s GDP, they are expected to receive 78 per cent of all funds through the programme, according to ECB data. The scheme is currently set to run until mid-2026.
... Spain welcomed 54 new projects in the same period of 2024, ranking third behind the US and UK, after ranking joint first with 77 new projects alongside the US in 2023.According to Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica, renewables in 2024 accounted for 56 per cent of all electricity production — the second year in a row that they generated more electricity than fossil and nuclear fuel combined. At its disposal are its natural advantages: an abundance of sun, plenty of wind and a relatively thinly populated countryside.Clean energy at competitive prices is a great opportunity to industrialise AndalusiaAs a result, electricity costs are lower than in many other EU countries — a benefit that is increasingly wooing energy-hungry firms. In May, Amazon Web Services announced that it would invest nearly €16bn to expand its existing data centres in Spain.
RenCen historic district study request could add red tape to redevelopment plans
https://archive.ph/cJjqz#selection-1667.8-1667.88
Crain's Detroit Business, 2/11/25
This isn’t the first time in recent months Whitfield Calloway has attempted to redirect the RenCen conversation away from demolition to redevelopment of the entire property. Last year, prior to the announcement of the Bedrock/GM vision, she released a statement calling for the top 20 floors of each office tower to be turned into housing units, creating some 2,000 or so of them.
She “is opposed to demolition of the office towers,” the statement said. “City Council will study the downtown commercial market demand, downtown residential market demand, tax incentives and the rights of private corporations to better understand the situation: however, the future of Detroit looks better with the existing four (office) towers of the Renaissance Center reused and repurposed. Detroit deserves better.”
Just how empty is the Renaissance Center?
Crain's Detroit Business, 10/1/24
https://archive.ph/r2r41#selection-1657.1-1657.42
Placer.ai data compiled for Crain’s Detroit Business by staff at the Downtown Detroit Partnership paints a grim picture, with the number of average daily workers in the downtown towers just 20% of their pre-pandemic levels in 2019. For comparison, the broader downtown recently has been close to triple that in recent months.
1,539 daily traffic in 2024, 9,453 in 2018
The Placer.ai figures include all six office towers, plus the 73-story Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center — the state’s tallest building at 727 feet — and its 1,300 or so hotel rooms.
And as caveat, noted by Joshua Long, the DDP’s director of data programs: It does not differentiate between, for example, GM workers — those that remain, that is — in the primary four towers surrounding the central hotel tower and the adjacent Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan workers in one of the two shorter 21-story buildings that were developed as part of the second phase in the 1980s.
In short: While the pandemic dealt a crippling blow, the RenCen was already showing signs of stress even before the first confirmed Michigan cases of COVID-19 were announced in March 2020, subsequently sending office workers across the state home as a way to combat its spread.
Downtown Detroit has evolved in the decades since the Renaissance Center was built, with Jefferson Avenue a major barrier to it. What once was seen as a selling point — separation from the central business district, but still part of it — to tenants in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond has been viewed as a major hindrance to the property as the central business district's center of gravity has shifted to Campus Martius Park in the last 15-20 years.
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