Detroit's Midtown neighborhood is building on its past, not tearing it down willy-nilly. It's an economic development policy that is garnering national attention, and for a good reason.
Excerpt:
DETROIT — In sharp contrast to the rest of the Detroit metropolitan area, an area known as Midtown just north of the central business district has been holding its own in the recession.
Much of the success of Midtown — as it was branded a decade ago — is a result of the strength of institutions like Wayne State University, the Detroit Medical Center, the Henry Ford Hospital and the Detroit Institute of Arts, all of which contribute students and employees as well as residents.
Another component of Midtown’s success is that its developers are refurbishing older buildings, using tax credits and public financing, as much as they are building from scratch.
“For a long time, there was a big effort to tear things down in Detroit,” said Michael Poris, a principal of the architecture firm McIntosh Poris Associates, which is restoring a former vaudeville house in Midtown for multiple uses. “But if we have all these great historic buildings here, why not take the historic tax credits and reuse them? Plus it’s a greener, more sustainable form of development.”
According to the CoStar Group, a real estate information company in Bethesda, Md., the vacancy rate for office space in Midtown — including an adjacent area called New Center, where the former headquarters of General Motors now houses state offices — stood at 8.2 percent in the second quarter of this year.
The vacancy rate in Detroit’s central business district, which at 24.5 million square feet has 3.5 times the space of Midtown, was 19.5 percent in the second quarter of 2010.
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