JV Plans $300M MXD to Replace Former Kmart HQ

TROY, MI-Though designed for thousands of office workers, a partnership of developers plan to demolish the 900,000-sf vacant, former Kmart headquarters complex on Big Beaver Road, to make way for a $300-million mixed-use project that would include 290,000 sf of retail, 300,000-sf office space, a 250-room hotel, a theater and 750 multifamily residences, likely condos that will include 150 senior housing units. The project could become the downtown that the city of 80,000 people has been searching for since dropping plans to build a city center around the city hall complex east of I-75 at Big Beaver Road.

The partnership to build the Pavilions of Troy includes Richardson Development Group Inc., based in Reston, VA; Boorn Partners based in Cincinnati and New York City-based BlackRock as the owner of the land. Hunter Richardson, principal with the self-named firm, tells GlobeSt.com that the civic downtown plans were doomed from the start. “That area is public land, it just can’t happen with government in the mix. This really requires private development.”

A better redevelopment location can’t be found in Troy. Since the migration of some of the 5,000 Kmart headquarters employees to the Sears HQ in Hoffman Estates, IL after the merger in 2005, the odd, pod-like office complex on the north side of Big Beaver, west of Coolidge Highway, has been the pink elephant in the area where many don’t want to accept that the state’s strongest office market, the Troy area, is going soft.