GM to Move HQ to New Tower in Detroit

General Motors will move its headquarters next year into a 49-story building under construction on the site of the former J.L. Hudson building in Detroit.

The skyscraper is part of a two-building 1.5M SF mixed-use project being developed by billionaire Dan Gilbert’s real estate firm Bedrock. When completed, it will be the second tallest building in the city, eclipsed only by the Renaissance Center, where GM has its current HQ.

“For GM, Hudson Detroit is the perfect fit,” Mary Barra, GM’s CEO said in an announcement this week. “We will be the signature tenant of this state-of-the-art building. It will be our corporate headquarters, our nerve center and collaborative space for our employees.”

GM, which has an estimated 5,000 employees in downtown Detroit, is the only major automaker still based within the city limits of Motown. The company has inked a 15-year lease to take the top two floors of the new Hudson building, according to a report in the Detroit Free Press.

The building known as Hudson’s Detroit is located on the historic site of the former Hudson’s Department Store, which was demolished in 1998. Gilbert bought the property in 2007.

The mixed-use project at the Hudson’s site, located at 1208 Woodward Avenue, will include 400K SF of office space, a luxury hotel, retail, residential and restaurants. The skyscraper will include a 210-room, Edition Hotel and 97 condos.

The announcement from GM is a much-needed shot in the arm for the city, which recently delayed the timing of another huge downtown mixed-use project.

Last month, a public-private partnership revised 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 Free Press, 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.