Downtown Detroit‘s evening skyline gained a pair of zombie office towers earlier this year when General Motors cut the neon lights at two of the original five 1970s Renaissance Center skyscrapers.

The darkened and mostly empty 39-story buildings, Tower 300 and Tower 400, are the octagonal-shaped towers closest to the riverfront. They’re the ones that would come down as part of an ambitious $1.6 billion RenCen redevelopment plan that was first unveiled in 2024 but remains in limbo while awaiting approval from the Michigan Legislature for a key development incentive.

Meanwhile, a retired pulmonologist, who last year bought one of the two shorter 1980s Renaissance Center office towers to the east of the originals, has been working on a plan to keep his building from becoming the next zombie.

Dr. Mahmoud Al-Hadidi, 64, said in a phone interview last month that he wants to convert his 21-story Tower 600 into a mix of commercial and residential space. Specifically, there would be 100 apartments on the upper floors, 200 hotel rooms directly below, and offices and other commercial spaces elsewhere.

The next step, Al-Hadidi said, would be to receive approval for must-have tax abatements from Detroit’s Downtown Development Authority as well as the city. Without the abatements, he said, “it would be very hard to sell those apartments or rent them.

“We’re hoping that we get an answer — a yes or no — within a month … and ‘no’ means this project is dead,” he added.

Al-Hadidi and his investor group, Stockbridge Enterprises, submitted the $9.2 million winning bid for Tower 600 during an April 2024 online auction. Tower 600 and its twin, Tower 500, were built as the second phase of the Renaissance Center development and opened in 1981.

At the time of the auction, Tower 600 was said to have just 11 percent occupancy. The seller was an investment group whose majority owner was said to be in California.

Al-Hadidi is still actively seeking office tenants for his tower, but not to fill it.

“This building is not going to be a fully office building,” he said. “It can’t — there’s no demand for that at this time.”

Al-Hadidi said he has a letter of intent from an interested hotel operator, although he can’t yet name the hotel brand.

“We have lenders ready to lend; we have hotels ready to go,” he said. “We’re waiting to see if the city will cooperate with us and give us a break, so we can get this done and out of the way within two years.”

As for the broader Renaissance Center complex, all five original buildings are still owned by GM, even though the automaker in January moved its global headquarters out of the RenCen and into the newly constructed Hudson’s Detroit office building on Woodward Avenue.

GM has partnered with Dan Gilbert‘s development firm, Bedrock, for the $1.6 billion Renaissance Center redevelopment plan. It calls for demolishing the two riverfront towers as well as the heavy-concrete and multistory “podium” connector. Of the three towers that would remain, under the plan:

• The 72-floor center tower — currently a Marriott — would become a mix of mid-market hotel space of about 858 rooms and 200 apartments. (The Marriott hotel is expected to remain open at least through April 2027, when Detroit will host the NCAA basketball Final Four.)
• The 39-floor Tower 100 would be converted from office space to about 384 apartments.
• The 39-floor Tower 200 would remain office space.

Also, a 30-acre riverfront park and civic space would be created around the RenCen.

The redevelopment still hinges on renewal of the state’s Transformational Brownfield program, Bedrock CEO Jared Fleisher said. Developers across the state have been waiting for the Legislature to take such action for more than a year. The Transformational Brownfield program allows developers of large and “transformational” projects to capture various streams of future state and local taxes generated at their project site for 20 to 30 years.

(It’s a different type of incentive than the more traditional residential and commercial property tax abatements needed by the Tower 600 redevelopment plan.)

“We are truly hoping that that breaks loose in the coming couple of months,” Fleisher said of the Transformational Brownfield renewal. “On the one hand, we take some solace that it’s not like they (state legislators) are passing a thousand things and are not in support of this program. But on the other hand, we really hope that there is a breakthrough.”

Bedrock intends to commit $1 billion in equity and debt toward the $1.6 billion plan, which, according to Fleisher, represents more of a “civic commitment” to Detroit than a business proposition.

GM would contribute $250 million toward the project, and $75 million more would come from the quasi-public Downtown Development Authority.

The precise value of the project team’s desired Transformational Brownfield incentive hasn’t been determined, Fleisher said, but would be at least $150 million.

“So, we’re prepared to put in a billion dollars,” he said. “We’re prepared to do it with no hope of ever making a profit on it. But (the project) is simply so big, we cannot do it alone.”

As for Al-Hadidi’s plan to introduce housing and hotel rooms at Tower 600, Fleisher said that Bedrock wishes him well.

“We’re a champion of anyone who wants to come into this city, take an abandoned asset and give it new life,” he said.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the Detroit Free Press and then was distributed on the USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.

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DETROIT — Before the arrivals of sprawling suburban malls featuring amusement park rides and stores peddling anything from jeans to jelly beans, there was Hudson’s in downtown Detroit.

The towering department store mirrored the growth and opulence of the auto-manufacturing town, but its fortunes — like the city’s — soured with population shifts and economic downturns.

In 1998, more than a century after J.L. Hudson’s Co. opened shop, the 25-story building was demolished, leaving — literally and figuratively — a deep hole as a reminder of Detroit’s past.

Until this year.

Standing on the Woodward Avenue site are a gleaming 45-story tower and a 12-story office building. The new 1.5 million-square-foot Hudson’s Detroit development also contains retail space and will feature high-end condos. General Motors Corp. is relocating its headquarters there and a five-star hotel is slated to open in 2027.

“People are saying this isn’t your father’s or grandfather’s Detroit anymore,” said Dan Gilbert, whose property management company Bedrock developed the $1.5 billion project. “You don’t even have to look at the numbers. You can just feel it walking around — you’re going to feel a different Detroit.”

The old Hudson’s building commanded attention and demanded respect, according to Jeremy Dimick, director of collections at the Detroit Historical Society. The new one is just as impressive. Its tower rises 685 feet over downtown Detroit.

Its arrival is the latest chapter in the city’s recovery.

Mired in debt, Detroit once struggled to pay its bills and keep the streetlights on. It filed for bankruptcy in 2013, when its credit rating was at junk bond status.

The city emerged from bankruptcy in 2014, built up a general fund balance of more than $1 billion, and has since recorded 10 consecutive years of budget surpluses. Moody’s Investment Services gave Detroit its 11th consecutive credit rating upgrade this year and named the Hudson’s development in its report.

“You feel the energy when you’re walking downtown,” Gilbert said. “There’s been just significant change.”

In support of it, Bedrock now owns more than 100 properties in downtown Detroit.

J.L. Hudson’s initially specialized in clothing for men and boys when it launched in Detroit in 1881. After occupying various downtown spaces, the business moved to the Woodward Avenue site a decade later and expanded its wares, according to the Detroit Historical Society.

The building grew over the years. About a dozen of its eventual 25 stories were used as retail space in what was considered the world’s tallest department store for more than half a century.

Dimick called it a Detroit institution.

“That was the reason to go downtown,” he said. “It had been around so long that it became this multigenerational experience of shopping. ‘I went there with my parents and I’m going to take my children.’”

The grand department store offered fine linen, tableware and kitchen appliances. Factory workers could find overalls there. But most of all, Hudson’s provided holiday magic.

Bedecked in color, sounds and excitement, it was the center of downtown festivities. Thousands of shoppers entered the store every day, moving from department to department on escalators and in elevators.

For 76-year-old Randye Bullock, a childhood trip to Hudson’s was far more than shopping.

“My grandparents made a point of dressing me up and we’d take the streetcar to Hudson’s. It was like we were going to Sunday dinner somewhere,” said Bullock, a retired public relations executive.

Her most vivid memories are of the store’s toy department.

“I did look forward to going every year around Christmastime because that’s when they introduced their new toys,” Bullock said. “I liked dolls and stuff, but I also liked trains.”

Detroit historian Michael Hauser remembers Hudson’s as a “store for everybody.”

“You had the budget basement store,” Hauser said. “Two whole floors of fashion, home goods. They had their own cafeteria. You didn’t have to be wealthy in order to dine or shop.”

Reminiscing about hot fudge sundaes at Hudson’s soda counter, Gilbert — the billionaire owner of Quicken Loans and the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers — said the new Hudson’s will try to replicate that magic.

“It will feel like back in the day,” he said.

It was a grand and exciting time to be a Detroiter until — like many big manufacturing hubs — the city began to change. New freeways were built. Middle- and upper-class families left the city for new suburban homes with big yards.

In the mid-1950s, Northland Center — then the largest mall in the U.S. — opened just north of Detroit, providing more options for suburban shoppers.

Detroit reached its population peak of 1.8 million that decade before a trickle of people leaving became a flood, taking their money with them. The city’s population only started to see growth again in 2023.

Hudson’s downsized and eventually closed in 1983. The building was imploded into a hulking mound of rubble, stone, steel and dust on Oct. 24, 1998.

“It was sad,” remembers Bullock, who watched the implosion from her brother-in-law’s downtown apartment.

What was left was worse.

“If you put all your stock, memory and nostalgia into this one place, when that place goes away it leaves you with a literal and figurative hole,” Dimick said.

Gilbert, 63, says it will take decades to get a return on his Hudson’s investment, but that isn’t the point of the development.

“We’re doing this for ourselves,” the fourth-generation Detroiter said, “but we’re also doing it for the city.”

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