Hey everyone,
We’ve extensively covered the Detroit Housing Commission’s (DHC) failings over the past year. Its properties are deteriorating, and its voucher program is mismanaged.
Central to the DHC’s troubles is a dispirited, overworked and unsupported staff. We spoke to seven former and current employees who said a broken workplace culture made it impossible to do their jobs effectively. Tenants and voucher holders reliant on Detroit’s largest provider of affordable housing have suffered as a result.
GM’s eventual move to the Hudson’s skyscraper from the Renaissance Center dominated last week’s news. Details have also emerged about Hudson’s residential and hotel components. Will Detroit benefit financially from the deal?
The Dirt
What’s next for the RenCen? General Motors Co. plans to relocate its headquarters to the new Hudson’s Detroit development when it opens. As soon as the news broke last week, people immediately began speculating about the fate of the Renaissance Center, which will be almost entirely empty once GM vacates. It’s unlikely to fill up soon given its enormous size (about 5.5 million square feet) and the dismal prospects for office space in the city. GM and Hudson’s developer Bedrock Detroit said they would jointly study what to do next with the RenCen (paywalled), which includes the city’s tallest building. The most likely scenario according to some real estate experts is converting part of the complex to hotel or residential space. This kind of adaptation is more feasible than in other modern office buildings (paywalled) and because the RenCen, nearly 50 years old, will soon be eligible for historic preservation tax credits. Demolition is also a possibility, given the high expense of any conversion and the prime value of the RenCen’s real estate. There are also a number of underutilized parcels adjacent to the building complex, many of them parking lots, that could make the whole area highly attractive to potential developers. (Detroit Free Press, Axios Detroit, Outlier Media, Crain’s Detroit Business, Detroit News, WWFerguson2)
No new jobs: GM’s move also led economists to again question Bedrock’s lofty job creation claims, which it used to justify public incentives that helped fund Hudson’s. Bedrock and the city argued in favor of the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks, saying Hudson’s would add revenue to the city through building tenants’ income taxes. None of that promised revenue will be coming from GM employees, however, since they already work in the city. Bedrock promised about 2,000 new non-construction jobs and $43 million in new municipal income taxes. But GM will make up about 850 of those jobs, or less than 43%. The deal will actually cause Michigan to lose revenue because part of employees’ income tax will now be captured by Bedrock instead of going to the state. It also won’t generate much new sales tax revenue because GM’s workers are already spending money downtown. One expert described the move as “shuffling the deck chairs,” something economists predicted would happen when City Council approved a $60 million tax break in 2022. (BridgeDetroit, Detroit City Council, Deadline Detroit)
Elmo comes to Milwaukee Junction: Detroit Public Television is changing both its name and location. The station, now named Detroit PBS, is planned to make a major move from Wixom back to Detroit. Its parent nonprofit, which was rebranded to Detroit Public Media, bought a vacant warehouse on Piquette Street (paywalled) in Milwaukee Junction for around $10 million last week using proceeds from the sale of its former headquarters. It plans on turning the property into a “community media campus” as part of a $20 million renovation. The Detroit PBS station will have more studio space at the new headquarters, alongside space for community events, a performance studio and educational facilities. Classical radio station WRCJ, also owned by Detroit Public Media, will also move into the new headquarters. It’s expected to open in 2026. (Detroit News, Crain’s)
Wealth generation (for most): A new study from the University of Michigan Poverty Solutions initiative found owner-occupied homes in Detroit grew in value by $3.9 billion from 2014-2022. The sizable increase happened across neighborhoods and demographic groups in a “relatively equitable” way, the study says. Black homeowners’ property values grew 80%, and some of the poorest neighborhoods saw the biggest increases in home value. The study’s authors also subtracted the value of nearly 15,700 homes lost to tax foreclosure: about $535 million. More than two-thirds of those foreclosures took place in the first two years, before the city and Wayne County Treasurer’s Office started taking measures to bring down foreclosures through payment plans and reductions in tax assessments. Many of those owners might have been able to hold on to their homes had these measures been enacted sooner and realized the hundreds of millions of dollars in gains from rising property values. (University of Michigan, Freep)
Development News Quick-Hitters
Here are a few more details about Hudson’s from this past week: All 45 floors of the tower’s residential component will be produced by Edition Hotels, the luxury hotel brand of Marriott International. That includes the city’s first five-star hotel and 97 condos that will sell for between $550,000 to more than $3 million. Those parts of the building are all at least three years out from completion (paywalled). (MLive, Freep, Crain’s)
City Council approved $142 million in tax breaks for a proposed riverfront hotel and praised developer Sterling Group for a community benefits package that effectively addressed community needs. (BridgeDetroit)
Tenants, organizers and two City Councilmembers gathered last week to demand more units and better conditions for older adults renting in Detroit. Speakers described widespread safety and health concerns and the need for more action in enforcement and funding from the city. (BridgeDetroit)
Homeowners who have mortgages with fixed interest rates several points below what’s available now are sitting on their homes in huge numbers. Even if they want to move, it doesn’t make financial sense for them to do it, resulting in a “nationwide lock-in effect” that’s kept housing inventory at historic lows. (New York Times)
Dig This
Panic attacks, dread and burnout: DHC staffers are barely hanging on
by Aaron Mondry
Workers at the Detroit Housing Commission who spoke with Outlier said the demanding, unsupportive workplace has led to poor service for the thousands of tenants and voucher holders who rely on the commission to keep them safely and consistently housed. Continual short-staffing has resulted in incomplete or delayed work, with employees feeling overwhelmed by the backlog of unfinished tasks. They said they never received adequate training — or any training — for their jobs.
“I experienced culture shock so to speak when I started at the DHC,” one former employee said. “It got to a point where I would dread going into work every day.”
One Good Ad
The ghostly signs of Detroit’s past
They won’t give you a jump scare, but Detroit’s ghost signs have an eerie quality nonetheless.
Amelia Benavides-Colón, a Detroit Documenter, featured some of these faded advertisements painted on the side of buildings for a recent article in the Detroit Free Press. Detroit — with its old building stock, much of it vacant and neglected — is ripe for ghost signs. Benavides-Colón, with the help of readers, documented nearly 50 signs in and around Detroit.
Ghost signs help (literally) paint a fuller picture of the city’s history. Most of them date back decades and give us a glimpse of what the street might have looked like.
These ghostly echoes remain for a few well-known Detroit businesses, like Vernors and Faygo. But the majority are for long defunct businesses or organizations — a department store, a chocolate factory, an evaporated milk brand. Some have been memorialized and preserved with new murals cleverly incorporating the old ads.
One ad dating back more than 100 years for a tire company featuring racist caricatures was recently uncovered after a demolition. No word on whether the ad will be taken down, covered up or acknowledged in some way.
If you fancy yourself a ghost sign hunter, check out all the photos from Benavides-Colón’s article or a book about ghost signs written by former Freep journalist Robert Allen. And let us know if you spot any more around town!
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