June 27, 2002

Keith Thomas

Tiger stadium is a historic structure, which was at one time called Briggs stadium. It was the home to the Detroit Tigers – a major league baseball team, and at one time the Detroit Lions, a national football team. Now that the Tiger’s organization, owned by Mike Illtich who rose to prominence from his Little Ceasers Pizza business, built a new stadium, Comerica Park, the original home to the Tiger’s sits empty slowly decaying from it’s non use and the ever changing Michigan weather.

Like other projects in recent years, there were many developers who had many different ideas for the stadium. From various sporting venues like bull fighting, track and field or Little League baseball to other plans such as condos or a varied mixed use environment. The city’s former administration seemed to desire a mixed use of housing and business in the renovated stadium. But for reasons that seem to haunt this city the administration could never come to terms with any of the would be stadium developers. Thus the current fate of the stadium remains unknown. The current administration has yet to put forth a plan for this or any city owned property in the city. So the state on non-development continues from one administration to the next.

This is not the first failed development plan that has haunted this city. The New Center Area, former headquarters to General Motors, is partially filled by state offices and employees who relocated from other parts of the city, mostly downtown offices. This gave the New Center Area an exchange of people after seeing General Motors leave for the Renaissance Center and the Detroit Riverfront. Furthermore the still empty Michigan Depot, the old train Station, sits decaying along with a varied number of buildings in the downtown area like the Book Cadillac Hotel, the David Whitney building and many other buildings each with their own name from a time when Detroit was filled to capacity and expanding rapidly but now sits empty and unwanted.

On top of this decay is the new – old plan to build The Campus Martius. This includes a central park surrounded by office buildings. Compuware is moving it’s new world headquarters to the northern edge of the developments and other buildings are planned, but have no concept or design. The US is currently in an economic recession, which always hits an economy that relies heavily on one or two industries hard. In Detroit the auto industry is still a primary economic factor in this city. In a recession the economic pains that each automaker feels is compounded when it trickles down to the suppliers and then the general public. Money has a way for moving into and out of a community. It’s primary vehicle for movement is people and when you cut off the people from the money, it stops flowing. A lack of development plans hinders progress in any city. A developer wants to know what will happen and occur if they begin a project. If Detroit’s new mayoral administration wants to stay ahead of the ill effects of this recession then it would be best to publish a preliminary development plan. While this could be subject to change it would provide a blueprint for success in the city and the new administration. Also a plan that continues the past development ideas would show a continuation instead of recreating plans for the city. While it is politically advantageous to adorn a city with unique development plans it is immature to expect a city the size of Detroit to start over every time there is a new mayor. A mayor has an obligation to continue some of the things from the previous administration. Former mayor Dennis Archer failed miserably in this department. Thus far new mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has not indicted in which direction he intends to proceed.