Charles DiRocco, managing director of industry trends and analysis with ULI, apologized for the bad news he was detailing as part of the group's recent Emerging Trends in Real Estate report. Of the 600 commercial real estate professionals surveyed for the annual report, most put Detroit as 45th out of the 45 national markets. "There's just not really anyone that sees any growth opportunity in Detroit right now," DiRocco said.

However, one of the key speakers of the day is spearheading a large development project in Troy, the Pavilions of Troy. Hunter Richardson with the Richardson Development Group is working with the city to bring in a $300-million redevelopment project on the site of the 900,000-sf former Kmart headquarters. The project is anticipated to have up to 600,000 sf of retail, 300,000 sf of office, a 250-room hotel and 750 multifamily units. In a private interview at the forum, Richardson tells GlobeSt.com that he's still bullish about the development and the City of Troy, though he's still not sure how the housing part will pan out. "With condos not doing as well, it may be that we just make more of the units apartments," he says. He hopes to have the project completed by 2010.

The theme of the forum is Connecting the Dots: Linking Suburban & Urban Town Centers Via Transit, an idea that the automobile-heavy Motor City has been averse to accomplish for decades. The problem with transit in the community is also one of a massive urban sprawl pattern, said Myron Orfield, a professor with the University of Minnesota and the Brookings Institution. "Job centers are less clustered here than in most parts of the country," he said, referring to how jobs and communities are too widely spread across Southeast Michigan, instead of having a few core job centers. "Two-thirds of Detroit jobs are not in a clustered area."