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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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