Royal Oak 'rethinks' downtown with city hall, parking, office tower plans

If cities had growth spurts like teens, Royal Oak just entered middle school.

After years of being a mostly one- and two-story “old-fashioned” downtown, with a 1950s feel like countless others nationwide, this one is gorging on new investment. And it’s growing like a weed, from short to mid-rise.

Almost whichever way you turn in this former railroad town, there are mid-rise buildings or soon will be — condo towers, apartments, parking decks and offices, offices, offices.

In one high-profile deal, dubbed Rethink Royal Oak, a developer plans to build a six-story office tower on what’s now a city parking lot, at the same time that the city demolishes its old city hall and police station to create a green space where the new office workers can stroll. And just a stroll away will be new city hall, new police station and new parking deck, financed in large part by rising property tax revenues from the downtown’s rash of new buildings.

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Royal Oak’s transition to taller buildings is exactly what attracted a batch of city-savvy visitors this week.

They’re conventioneers from a three-day meeting of the Urban Land Institute, being held at Detroit’s Cobo Center – a herd of city planners and architects who came to Michigan mainly to take in the rebirth of Detroit. But a busload also wanted to see downtown Royal Oak, as it soars toward becoming the ideal walkable downtown.

If all goes as planned, the city’s commercial core will be chock-full of office jobs by day while retaining the busy nightspots it’s known for, said tour guide Robin Boyle, a professor of urban planning at Wayne State University.

“A lot of things are changing in our suburban cities — people want to live and work in denser walkable areas, where they don’t need a car for everything,” Boyle said.

That alone isn’t surprising. Long-term trends show that both 20-somethings and retirees increasingly seek car-free settings. But what made Royal Oak’s piece of that fascinating to the urban groupies is how the city played its cards to make it happen.

Royal Oak officials nearly a decade ago realized they’d reinvented their downtown, but only halfway. The downtown certainly had a vibrant nightlife — almost too vibrant at times, when youthful visitors jammed sidewalks and parking lots after dark. But the areas’s retail and daytime restaurant traffic was soft.

“People were looking at us as just a dining-restaurant scene,” said Todd Fenton, the city’s economic development director.

“We realized, if we built up our daytime population (with office workers), that would let us support our stores as well as our restaurants,” Fenton said.

So the elected Royal Oak City Commission held town meetings, hired consultants, debated options, then struck on a goal three years ago: Do whatever it takes to gain 180,000 square feet of new office space by 2020.

Often, that meant granting property-tax breaks for investors. In the case of the new office tower in Rethink Royal Oak, there are different sweeteners. The city will sell the land for $1 and provide a $5.5-million “incentive payment” to the developer, City Manager Don Johnson said.

“Every office building that’s going up – we have some skin in the game,” Johnson said, referring to tax abatements and other incentives. So far, those investments are paying dividends. The initial goal of 180,000 square feet of new office space is just a memory.

“Right now, we’re looking at hitting 300,000 square feet, and I’m not counting a couple of projects that we think are coming,” Fenton said.

It turned out that, once the Great Recession ended, developers fell in love with Royal Oak’s central location, amid two freeways, coupled with its already walkable downtown. It didn’t hurt that Oakland County as a whole has boomed ever since bottoming out in 2010, according to a University of Michigan study released last week.

The builders pounced on Royal Oak. First came the residential breed, who quickly snatched up every available lot for new housing starts. In 2013-15, the city had a run of residential construction virtually unmatched by any other metro Detroit community on a new-housing-per-capita basis.

Then came the officer species. And suddenly, the downtown skyline started looking like, well, someplace else.

“Everybody says we’re gonna be the next Birmingham,” said John McEntee, a 50-year employee at the Nutrifoods health-food store, on Main Street just south of 11 Mile Road.

Nutrifoods opened there in 1954, at the start of Royal Oak’s last big building boom, when “vitamin” was a new word to most Americans. Now, as McEntee gazes at generation of buildings that have sprouted since then, including a soon-to-open office tower that obliterated the parking lot right behind the store, it’s as if he’d fed the skyline his best-selling nutrition supplement.

The list of new downtown buildings includes:

Hyatt Place, a six-story hotel to be open by September on North Main, at the site of a former car dealership;

Etkin Building, a soon-to-open mid-rise office tower that rose a former city-owned parking lot, behind traditional storefronts on South Main – and fully leased before completion, city officials said.

Kinetic Creations headquarters, a new midrise office building under contructions, three blocks east and four blocks south of the city’s downtown epicenter, 11 Mile and Main.

In addition, Royal Oak has massive swaths of construction under way outside its downtown, near 13 Mile and Woodward. One facet is a new shopping center at the southwest corner, to be called the Woodward Corners by Beaumont because the property is owned by adjoining Beaumont Hospital. Another is just east of the northeast corner, a 10-acre housing development swaddled in a 40-acre park on the site of a former city golf course.

Royal Oak is one of a bevy of Detroit suburbs, as well as towns nationwide, that built its city hall and other key facilities in the 1950s and ‘60s. Royal Oak’s city hall is so outmoded, it would cost more to renovate than to build from scratch, consultants told the city. And demolishing it as part of Rethink Royal Oak, along with the old police station, makes space for a park that will add immensely to the downtown’s walkable feel, Mayor Mike Fournier said.

"It's been in the works for a good while, and now the flowers are finally going to bloom," Fournier said with a chuckle, a light-hearted reference to landscaping he expects in the new park.

The first tangible step in Rethink Royal Oak is set for the end of the day Monday. That’s when the city will do what some residents said was unthinkable: close the parking lot in front of city hall, essential for those doing city business by day and the after-dark dining and drinking crowd. To overcome that has been a communication challenge, said Royal Oak’s communications manager Judy Davids.

“Part of our Rethink Royal Oak brand is that we want to get people rethinking how to get around during the project – rethinking where to park and how to do things at city hall,” Davids said.

The second step will be a party of sorts. It's a festival that ballyhoos another side to car-free downtowns: lots of bicycles. On May 11, 6-9 p.m., the city will kick off the actual construction start for Rethink Royal Oak with a bike rodeo, at the parking lot that’s to become a park.

“It will give people a sense of what it’ll be like to have a downtown park,” Davids said,.

Former City Commissioner Jim Rasor, whose law office is just steps from where the new park will land, said he recalled proposing the idea of a downtown park to replace the sea of parking meters in 2011.

“I think downtown central parks are essential for a sense of community, for public events. I grew up near Birmingham, with its downtown (Shain) park. Look at Plymouth. Look at downtown Detroit” and the allure of Campus Martius, Rasor said.

“In my original plan, we weren’t thinking about a new city hall and police station. We didn’t have the money. Now, they do,” he said.

Contact Bill Laitner: blaitner@freepress.com