Without a soccer stadium, potential uses for jail site multiply

Would be one of the largest parcels of potentially developable land downtown

Still hinges on sealing a deal for an alternative jail site

The 15-acre Wayne County Consolidated Jail site offers a rare combination of location and scale, a prized one-two punch in downtown Detroit development.

And now it's effectively a blank slate following the Dan Gilbert and Tom Gores bombshell that they plan to have their hoped-for Major League Soccer team play in Ford Field instead of building a new stadium on roughly two-thirds, or 10 acres, of the county-owned jail site at Gratiot Avenue and I-375 at the foot of the central business district.

What exactly would go there if Gilbert, the founder and chairman of Quicken Loans Inc. and Rock Ventures LLC, and his lieutenants can hammer out an agreement with Wayne County to build a new criminal justice complex elsewhere is a mystery.

When the MLS plan was unveiled in April 2016, the project was said to include the stadium plus three high-rise towers 18 to 28 stories tall with office, residential and hotel uses flanking it. But Matt Cullen, principal of Rock Ventures, said Thursday that those plans were preliminary and that no formal determination had been made about the mix of uses or the density of the project.

"We gave a rendering (of what it could look like), but we haven't gotten to a programming conclusion, let alone a massing study," Cullen said.

But whatever goes there if Gilbert develops it will tie in with his planned projects sprinkled around the downtown core. And the development team has an additional 10 acres to play around with in its vision for the site.

"If you think about Campus Martius, moving now into the new Monroe (Block) development (to the east), which moves right into Greektown, then this project with MLS and football next door, and the Red Wings and Pistons (on Woodward), this will be a key gateway," he said. "It'll be mixed-use. It clearly will have a lot of entertainment aspects to it. It won't be sort of just a generic office block. We'll be looking at bringing a lot of vitality to the site."

It's not just the jail site itself that's in the works. Gilbert's team has been in discussions with Syncora Guarantee Inc., the Bermuda-based bond insurer that was a holdout creditor in Detroit's bankruptcy, on the former Detroit Police Department headquarters building at 1300 Beaubien St. for a possible redevelopment as part of the broader jail site plan, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

It's also considerably larger than virtually all other known Gilbert project sites, some that have been discussed and revealed publicly, and others that have been kept behind closed doors.

For starters, the site of the former J.L. Hudson's department store at Woodward and Grand River is 2 acres; it's slotted to have an 800-foot residential skyscraper and hundreds of thousands of square feet for other uses such as office and retail with a price tag of $900 million.

The Monroe Block project spans about 3.5 acres of largely vacant property immediately east of Gilbert's Quicken Loans headquarters in the One Campus Martius building. Current plans for the $800 million project include a 35-story office tower plus 480 multifamily units in a series of mid- and high-rise buildings, 170,000 square feet of retail space and 48,000 square feet of public space.

Yet there are other large sites on the Detroit riverfront Gilbert has his eyes on, including a General Motors-owned property at least 10 acres in size immediately east of the Renaissance Center and the Uniroyal Tire Co. site by Belle Isle, which is 45 acres and has long been the subject of discussions with Gilbert's team for a mixed-use development.

"This is great news," said Richard Karp, a Lansing-based developer who has Detroit projects in Capitol Park and along Washington Boulevard, said of Ford Field being the chosen MLS team location rather than the jail property, which has sat languishing since 2013, when construction was halted amid cost overruns.

"This opens up the potential uses to the site to a much greater field of flexibility. That size will accommodate basically whatever anybody wants."