DETROIT | Development & Construction: Motown Lowdown

[LMich]

Okay, that makes more sense. I can totally see residential development moving back downtown as the midtown market gets overheated/oversatured. Have to say, though, I think they are lowballing what's probably about to take place in New Center.

[animatedmartian]

So Rocket Fiber (a Dan Gilbert IT company) has an ad downtown of a futuristically stylized Detroit.


http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article...n-detroit-just

The Crain's author seemed concerned that the building on the far right was a future Dan Gilbert project, but to me it seems obvious that the third tower from the left (the all glass tower) is supposed to be the Hudson's site tower. The darker tower just to the bottom left of the glass tower looks like a stylized version of the proposal for the Monroe Block.

Among other things, you can see Little Ceaser's Arena, the Ren Cen, the Gordie Howie Bridge as well as the Ambassador Bridge, plus the David Stott, the Penobscot, and One Detroit Center. It's a pretty cool piece of artwork with a lot of hidden little gems in it.

That "Windsor skyline" at first made me think Windsor suddenly became Dubai, but on closer look, it may actually just be a side-horizon view of Detroit's skyline. It does make me think the tower on the far right may actually be a not so subtle way of suggesting Gilbert has something planned even bigger than the Hudson's site.

Of course, Gilbert & company have responded saying this is nothing more than a theoretical artistic view of a future Detroit. We may never know.

[The North One]

I'm curious as to how far this fiber internet infrastructure goes, is it just downtown?

[subterranean]

'Future proof' your business? More like proofread your garbage billboard.

I kept rereading it, wondering what should've come next in that sentence given there is no hyphen. As if they meant it to read "future proof my business will be illiterate."

[animatedmartian]

Originally Posted by The North One

I'm curious as to how far this fiber internet infrastructure goes, is it just downtown?

So far yea. They've mostly just connected to individual buildings with the farthest connections in New Center. The plan is to serve the entire greater downtown area. The QLine also provides free WiFi through Rocket Fiber. This includes all the stations and the trains.

https://rocketfiber.com/service-map/

[LMich]

Originally Posted by animatedmartian

So Rocket Fiber (a Dan Gilbert IT company) has an ad downtown of a futuristically stylized Detroit.


http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article...n-detroit-just

The Crain's author seemed concerned that the building on the far right was a future Dan Gilbert project, but to me it seems obvious that the third tower from the left (the all glass tower) is supposed to be the Hudson's site tower. The darker tower just to the bottom left of the glass tower looks like a stylized version of the proposal for the Monroe Block.

Among other things, you can see Little Ceaser's Arena, the Ren Cen, the Gordie Howie Bridge as well as the Ambassador Bridge, plus the David Stott, the Penobscot, and One Detroit Center. It's a pretty cool piece of artwork with a lot of hidden little gems in it.

That "Windsor skyline" at first made me think Windsor suddenly became Dubai, but on closer look, it may actually just be a side-horizon view of Detroit's skyline. It does make me think the tower on the far right may actually be a not so subtle way of suggesting Gilbert has something planned even bigger than the Hudson's site.

Of course, Gilbert & company have responded saying this is nothing more than a theoretical artistic view of a future Detroit. We may never know.

Yeah, so you and Crain's are way overthinking thing.

[Detroit1995]

That billboard does make you wonder though. If Detroit's tallest tower will break ground in December, then what else does the future hold for the city. I mean who thought we'd be seeing this much development in 2017?

[The North One]

Hopefully lots of Madrid-esque mid rise development.

[animatedmartian]

More movement from the suburbs to downtown. Although oddly they've owned the building for quite a while.

Church of Scientology to spend $8 million to renovate its vacant downtown Detroit building
By KIRK PINHO. Crain's Detroit. July 19, 2017.



The Church of Scientology has owned the former Standard Savings & Loan building in downtown Detroit for a decade but has done nothing with it. That's about to change.

The Los Angeles-based church has been issued a building permit for $8 million worth of work to the 50,000-square-foot building at the corner of Griswold Street and Jefferson Avenue.

The permit was issued Monday and calls for interior and exterior renovations, according to online city records. The contractor is Sterling Heights-based Roncelli Inc.

"The building will house the Church of Scientology of Detroit and is part of the Church's international program to service its parishioners in 'ideal' Churches," Karin Pouw, international spokeswoman for the church, said in an email to Crain's on Wednesday.

"The Church will have a chapel, rooms for parishioners to study the religion and public areas for community meetings and activities."

Construction work will start "soon," Pouw said.

....

The Southfield office of Los Angeles-based CBRE Inc. is listing the church's 15,100-square-foot Farmington Hills building at 28000 Middlebelt Rd. for sale for $1.5 million.

The staff of the Farmington Hills building will form the core of the staff at the new Detroit building, Pouw said.

...

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article...ate-its-vacant

[animatedmartian]

Also somewhat under the radar but important if the city is to get another stadium, 37,000 people just saw a soccer game at Comerica Park.

Soccer fans excited about Comerica match but want more
Ted Kulfan, The Detroit News. July 19, 2017.


http://www.freep.com/story/sports/20...ain/494343001/

This was good, two popular European soccer teams, a festive atmosphere at Comerica Park and around downtown Detroit.

But it only wet the appetite for fans like Mike Bishop.

As far as Bishop is concerned — as well as many other fans Wednesday around Comerica Park — it’s time to bring professional soccer to Detroit.

....

Wednesday’s match between AS Roma and Paris Saint-Germain was expected to draw 30,000-35,000 fans. It was part of the International Champions Cup, an 8-team round-robin exhibition.

The games are taking place in the next two weeks in 11 U.S. stadiums, with Detroit of particular interest.

Dan Gilbert and Tom Gores, two local NBA owners, are leading the charge to bring an expansion Major League Soccer (MLS) team to Detroit

Gilbert and Gores want to build an approximately 25,000-seat stadium with mixed-use development in time for the 2020 MLS season on the unfinished Wayne County jail site on Gratiot and I-375.

The MLS is expected to award four expansion teams — two this year, two in the near future.

If Wednesday’s match was a bit of a litmus test, the Detroit market is ready for pro soccer.

.....

Fans would like to see a pro team with its own facility in downtown Detroit — but also wouldn’t mind seeing Detroit City FC somehow a part of it.

The raucous atmosphere and passionate fan base combine to form the closest thing Detroit sports fans have seen to a European soccer atmosphere.

“I don’t know if it’s possible (for Detroit City to be part of an MLS bid), but that would be ideal,” said Bridget Goolsby, of Detroit, who attended Wednesday’s match with her boyfriend just one day after watching Detroit City play an exhibition match in Hamtramck against an Italian club team. “The matches are so fun, so different.

“If they could put that excitement into the new (soccer) stadium, it would be a lot of fun.”

With the Tigers the lone pro sports attraction for much of the summer, soccer would fill a void for fans.

...

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/spo...ant/103845622/



In other sports/development related news, the Ford Field is currently undergoing renovations.

With $100 million in renovations, Ford Field 'capable of hosting a Super Bowl'
By KURT NAGL, Crain's Detroit. July 19, 2017.



Ford Field is on schedule to finalize $100 million in renovations by Aug. 1, in plenty of time for the Detroit Lions' first preseason home game Aug. 19.

That was the word from team President Rod Wood on Wednesday during a media tour of the "new Ford Field," as the venue is being branded.

New $20 million-plus video scoreboards spanning 270 feet, wrap-around LED screens and major upgrades to suite, restaurant, bar and lounge spaces are in store for Lions fans and concertgoers this season.

"This stadium is capable of hosting a Super Bowl," Wood told reporters packed into a renovated suite.

The stadium hosted Super Bowl XL in 2006, four years after it opened.

The stadium will boast 26,500 square feet of LED displays composed of 28.8 million LEDs. About 209,000 square feet of premium seating space has been renovated and redesigned.

Detroit-based Rossetti Associates Inc. is the project architect. Detroit-based Turner Construction Co. is the general contractor on the suite project.

The scoreboards, which are twice the size of the previous ones, and video displays were installed by Brookings, S.D.-based Daktronics, which also was contracted for the 5,100-square-foot video scoreboard at Little Caesars Arena.

....

Several new restaurants are being added to the concourse, including another Slow's on the northeast side. Others will be announced, likely the week before the first preseason home game, said Ellen Trudell, corporate communications manager for the Lions.

Although some suites were moved to make way for the new private sections on the north end, there are still 128 suites in the stadium, Trudell said.

Wood said about 30 suites are still available for the upcoming season.

Ford Field's 65,000-person capacity is unchanged.

Fans will also notice subtler changes throughout the stadium, including new designs to liven up the drab concrete concourse. In addition to Lions insignia along the walls, floors will be lined with blue and white yardage markers.

...

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article...osting-a-super

[LMich]

Beacon Park at the DTE Energy headquarters opens today:


Michelle & Chris Gerard


Michelle & Chris Gerard

[subterranean]

I like the park. What's the programming? I especially like that it was a surface lot previously.

[The North One]

YES, cash in on those Superbowl dollars.

[LMich]

The Motown Museum expansion is getting closer to its goal:

Motown Museum expansion gets financial boost from Lear

By Brian McCollum | Detroit Free Press

July 20, 2017

The Motown Museum has taken another leap toward its planned expansion, following a $750,000 donation from Lear Corp.

With an additional $400,000 raised at a June gala hosted by Lear, the Southfield company's efforts amount to more than $1.1 million for the expansion project, which would transform the Hitsville, U.S.A., site into a 50,000-square-foot exhibit, performance and retail complex.

The Lear gift follows $6 million from Ford and UAW-Ford and $2 million from the William Davidson Foundation, as the Motown Museum continues its $50-million fund-raising effort.

[deja vu]

This is small news, but I think it's important to emphasize these types of placemaking efforts, especially at borders and edges of dissimilar neighborhoods:

Detroit 67 Placemaking Grantee Project in Jefferson Chalmers
aims to reduce physical and symbolic barriers between residents in Detroit and Grosse Pointe Park
Michigan Historic Preservation Network

“Fox Creek Park: Art Beyond Borders,” a collaborative project between seven different organizations including Jefferson East, Inc. and the Michigan Historic Preservation Network, is forging new relationships between Detroit and Grosse Pointe Park residents through the redesign of a public park at the Detroit-Grosse Pointe Park border. An unveiling ceremony for the project will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, July 29, 2017 at Fox Creek Park, located on the corner of Jefferson and Ashland in Detroit.

The unveiling ceremony will highlight renewed strategies to strengthen relations between Jefferson Chalmers and Grosse Pointe Park through placemaking...

[animatedmartian]

How an ambitious community-led design project is renewing this historic Detroit neighborhood
A collaboration between designers and residents will turn a neglected park into a thriving public space

CHAD ROCHKIND AND OMAR TORO-VACA



This is our fully unified vision for Roosevelt Park and it ties all of today’s disparate parcels into a single plot. Vehicles navigate around the park, but not through it.

All participants in Workshop 2 applied lessons from the two previous schemes to fine-tune the use and activities envisioned for this plan.

The scheme emanates from the concept of a ripple, starting on the northwest corner of the park toward the east, south, and west extremes where slight undulations in the topography rise and fall to form a gorgeous landscape of diverse experiences.

The ripple originates in the northwest portion of the park, where participants aptly placed a pond feature. A gateway and playground anchor the northwest corner where a number of the main paths that cut through the park originate. Community members programmed a diagonal path moving in the east-west direction as a flexible, temporary drive where food trucks might enter the park for special events or where a farmer’s market might set up on a weekly basis. At the center of the scheme, an amphitheater nests itself into the ripples (with the imposing facade of Michigan Central Station as its backdrop). The perimeter of the park comes to life with sports fields and playgrounds meant to be readily available to the adjacent neighborhoods, which may someday feature increased housing options.



As a grassroots effort, we are trying to demonstrate that the marriage of community-led design and high design is possible. This process might be slower and have more twists and turns than top down dictates, but we are confident that as the process continues, the park’s redesign will better reflect the aspirations of the neighborhoods nearby, while embedding ethics into the DNA of any surrounding development that may emerge.

To formalize all of this, a group of local residents are forming a new park-specific nonprofit that will steward the process into the next stage, and the city of Detroit has given us the green light to move ahead with our community-led process.

Our hope is that this will provide a model for other large-scale design efforts throughout the urban world. Community engagement is not a box to be checked off but the foundation of a healthy process. Community voice is not something to be discarded; it is the expression of our co-creators.

....

http://www.therenewalproject.com/how...-neighborhood/

[animatedmartian]

Since photobucket is a crap image hosting website, I figure I'd reupload any pictures that probably aren't showing up. Here are some renderings of current proposals and new construction in Detroit as well as the most recent status update for them. This is strictly new construction since there's a ton of renos in various stages. I might save that for another post.

The Seldon, 12 units.
Expected completion by summer 2017. I didn't even realize this was under construction already and had to drive by to check it out myself.


The Coe at West Village, 12 units
Expected completion fall 2017.


City Modern, 140 units
First units available by early 2018 (picture from July 1, 2017)


Elton Park, Phase One, 151 units
Expected completion by 2018 (picture from July 22, 2017 from behind Checker Cab building)


Third and Grand, 231 units
Expected completion by 2018

http://www.dailydetroit.com/2017/06/...nd-new-center/


Sugar Hill apartments; 84 units.
Groundbreaking September 2018.


Russell Flats, 82 units.
Expected completion in spring 2018. Was expected to start construction spring 2017 however as of summer 2017, construction has yet to start (as far as I could tell).


West Willis Street apartments, 36 units.
Groundbreaking expected spring 2018. Historic District Commission has given conditional approval however the design could change by groundbreaking.


Midtown West, formally Wigle Recreation Center, 175 units.
Groundbreaking fall 2018.


The Woodward @ Midtown, 104 units.
Expected to be complete by late 2018/early 2019. Construction has yet to start.


644 & 634 & 666 Selden St., 8 units, mixed use
Construction has started (didn't snap any pictures though since I didn't realize which project it was).


Hastings Place, 60 units
Expected completion in 2018


Randolph Centre, 16,000 sq ft office space
Expected completion spring 2018


Statler City Apartment (or Club City Apartments), 288 units
Expected groundbreaking, August 2017 (based on DDA approval from May 2017).


The Ashton, 98 units
Expected completion in 2019


Cass and York, 181 units
Expected completion late 2018


Baltimore Station, Phase One, 23 units
Expected completion by late 2017


Baltimore Station, Phase Two, 151 units
Expected completion early 2018


SOMA, 400,000 sq ft office space
Parking structures and retail to be completed by 2018, office space to be complete by 2019


Pistons Practice Facility
Expected completion by late 2018


Henry Ford Brigitte Harris Cancer Pavilion
Expected completion early 2020

[LMich]

SOMA, 400,000 sq ft office space

Where did this one come from? At 400,000 square feet, that is significant office building. Is all we're seeing pictured above the parking garage (with ground floor retail)?

[animatedmartian]

Originally Posted by LMich

Where did this one come from? At 400,000 square feet, that is significant office building. Is all we're seeing pictured above the parking garage (with ground floor retail)?

It's 400,000 across multiple buildings. I think it includes two existing buildings which are 90,000 and 50,000 square feet each. That leaves 260,000 square feet for the new construction. The new construction is only mentioned as having 8 stories each. It's also possible the 90,000 sq ft existing office building could be demolished which could change the overall size of the project. Therefore the designs (except for the parking garages) are not finalized.

The parking garages are apart of phase one and pretty much what we'll see first until the office space is finalized.



https://www.friedmanrealestate.com/l...t-development/

http://hscre.com/estate/redevelopmen...-woodward-ave/

[Docta_Love]

Thanks for going out animatedmartian and grabbing the construction pics n' also for doin that rundown i had forgotten about a lot of those projects.

Here's a piece from Curbed Detroit that touches on the recent report of 5.4 billion being invested from 2017-2020 and the over all strength of the downtown office market, they got a nice graphic so i figured id post even if its not all exactly new.

New reports show low office vacancy, billions invested in Downtown Detroit
BY ROBIN RUNYAN
JUL 24, 2017
Curbed Detroit



We’ve seen more construction in the last few years in Detroit than we’ve seen here in decades. Much of that has been focused on the downtown core, although it’s slowly starting to move out into the neighborhoods. Two new reports highlight the growth over the past seven years and what we can expect in the future.

CBRE recently released their Downtown Detroit Development Report, which shows the development impact on office, retail, and residential markets. Their research shows a capital investment of $5.4 billion in development project from 2017-2020. Of these, we can see:

6,091 new apartment units
1,196 new hotel units
2.1 million square feet of new office space

....

JLL’s Skyline Review shows that Detroit’s office vacancy in its taller buildings is currently 7.5 percent, well below the national average of 12.9 percent. As more businesses are moving downtown, the need for more office space rises. The report cites high-profile tenants like Microsoft moving into the current office space downtown, and more buildings rising in the next few years that will change the skyline itself. Dan Gilbert, who has said numerous times that more office space is needed, currently has plans for a new office tower on the Monroe Block downtown, the massive Hudson’s site project (slightly taller than the Ren Cen), and the possibility to build near the Riverfront.

https://detroit.curbed.com/2017/7/24...cy-development