Upon completion in September 2012, the building will have 125 apartments on floors five through 34, three floors of office space and a restaurant in the lower level. The offices are leased by Invest Detroit, which will in turn sublease the space to startup companies. The upper 10 floors are designated as the “penthouse” level, with upgraded amenities and a separate elevator, with units up to 2,200 square feet.

Fred Beal, owner of the firm, tells GlobeSt.com that though no units are completed, visitors on Nov. 5 will be able to walk through select floors and check out the views. “We’re trying to build excitement about the leasing, which just opened a few days ago,” Beal says. “One of our big sales features is we’re right across from Comerica Park. In many of our units, you can look out and literally see home plate.”

The company is one of very few entities developing any new product in the Detroit area, especially in the downtown. There have been issues with bringing Detroit back as a 24-hour city, specifically image issues such as crime and poor schools, as well as a significant lack of support retail. However, Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert has recently spurred new activity in Detroit with the purchase of a handful of buildings downtown and promises of redevelopment, including an announcement this week of a possible apartment-retail building at the site of the former Hudson department store.

Beal says he’s been glad to be on the starting end of this new resurgence. “There’s a lot of momentum downtown,” he says. “We’ve had some market studies say downtown Detroit could absorb 300 to 500 new apartments per year indefinitely.”

He says there’s been a great outpouring of interest for the Broderick, with leases already signed for some of the penthouse units. “If you can start with four blocks of redevelopment, then move to eight blocks, and so on, we hopefully can continue to improve and evolve into a nice downtown,” Beal says.