Developers Delay Construction on $1.5B District Detroit

A public-private partnership is revising its plans for a $1.5B mixed-use project aiming to revitalize downtown Detroit, delaying construction until early next year.

District Detroit, which will include six new buildings and adaptive re-use of four other properties in an underutilized swath of downtown, originally was scheduled to break ground last summer.

The project’s developers, New York-based Related Cos. and Olympia Development of Michigan, have pushed back the construction timeline to early 2025 and revised their plans to prioritize the construction of a hotel and a residential building, delaying the timeline for new office space, according to a report in the Detroit Free Press.

Andrew Cantor, Related’s executive VP of development, told the newspaper the “resequencing” of the District Detroit project is a response to the challenging lending environment for new office projects.

According to the report, the developers still plan to build all of the 10 projects encompassed by District Detroit, including three new office towers. Original plans for the development envisioned 696 residential units, 1.2M SF of offices, 100K SF of retail and 400 hotel rooms.

District Detroit requires a groundbreaking by March 28, 2025 on at least one of its 10 projects in order to maintain eligibility for a $615M, 35-year tax break as a Transformational Brownfield project, a spokesperson for the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. told the Free Press.

The incentive, which was approved by the City Council on March 28, 2023, required construction to start within two years of the approval date. Last year, the developers requested tax incentives to cover nearly half the cost of building District Detroit.

One of the office towers now on hold is a 17-story building planned for 2200 Woodward, next to Comerica Park, that originally was scheduled to open next year. The project has a commitment from a potential anchor tenant, the report said.

According to the revised schedule, the first District Detroit projects now will be a residential tower and one of two hotels planned for the development.

An 18-story, 261-unit apartment building with ground-floor retail will rise at 2205 Cass, near a site for the University of Michigan Center for Innovation (UMCI). The apartment tower will include housing for UMCI students and reserve 20% of units as affordable apartments at below-market rents.

The hotel project will either be a new 14-story, 290-room hotel planned for a site next to Little Ceasars Arena or an adaptive reuse of the 10-story Fox Theatre office building at 2211 Woodward into a 177-room Fox Hotel, the report said.