What $30M project at old Tiger Stadium site means for Corktown

The revitalization of Detroit's historic Corktown neighborhood took another step forward Tuesday with groundbreaking for "The Corner," a $30-million mixed-use project that will fill in the final piece of the old Tiger Stadium site.

Headed by developer Eric Larson of Larson Realty Group, the mid-rise project will feature 111 rental apartments, including studio, one- and two-bedroom units, and about 26,000 square-feet of retail fronting Michigan Avenue at Trumbull.

To comply with city wishes to keep Detroit affordable for longtime residents, plans call for 20% of the apartments to be leased at rates geared to renters whose incomes are no more than 80% of area median income. And 60% of the retail space will be leased at half the going market rate to small local retailers.

Corktown, of course, remains one of Detroit's most historic neighborhoods, and its rapidly evolving character captures something about the state of the city today, poised between past and future. So here are some observations from Tuesday's event:

First, the highly anticipated plans by Ford to build a campus in Corktown dedicated to future mobility designs will change everything. The automaker plans to soon move its first couple of hundred engineers into a building at 1907 Michigan Ave., close to The Corner project. And Ford is looking to acquire multiple other sites to create a whole campus in Corktown, most notably the Michigan Central Station, the city's most notorious eyesore.

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Ford's coming will bring a whole new layer of demand to a district already popular with newcomers — the educated millennials working in tech-related jobs who enjoy Corktown's restaurants and coffee shops and its easy walkability. Ford hasn't said much about its plans, but we know that it hopes to fill up multiple sites in Corktown, which will create demand for even more urban amenities.

"I'm thrilled for what it means for Corktown," Larson said at the groundbreaking Tuesday. "The fact that they're looking at this as a hotbed of innovation is very exciting. Everything I hear is that they're very serious."

Ford in Corktown will be part of Detroit's larger redevelopment story, but it'll be impressive just by itself.

Second, development takes a long time. The Detroit Tigers played their final game at Michigan and Trumbull in 1999. The old ballpark was finally demolished a decade later. Plans and schemes came and went after that. A youth-sports facility run by the Police Athletic League opened on half the site. But Larson's project, the one that finally got to groundbreaking Tuesday, has been in the works for five years.

So many things delay redevelopment, including a lack of cash. Larson finally stitched together a financial package that includes debt and equity from at least eight sources, most of them of the mission-based variety of nonprofit lenders. The array included Goldman Sachs, Capital Impact Partners, Local Initiatives Support Corp., Invest Detroit, Michigan Strategic Fund, Enterprise Community Partners Inc., Detroit Brownfield Redevelopment Authority and the City of Detroit.

"There's nothing like a little bit of perseverance," Larson said at the groundbreaking.

Yet the 19 years between the ballpark closing and Tuesday's groundbreaking ranks as no more than a modest delay in Detroit. Don't forget that nearly 35 years passed after the closing of the old downtown Hudson's in 1983 and Dan Gilbert's groundbreaking for his new project on the site last December.

In hotter markets, say along Chicago's lakefront or in downtown Toronto, development activity runs so briskly that dozens of cranes dot the skyline. But in challenging cities like Detroit, it remains a slog.

And third, there's the changing nature of Corktown itself. Long thought of as "Detroit's oldest neighborhood," with modest wood-frame houses dating to the mid-19th Century, Corktown has evolved year by year for many decades.

We often forget that the quaint residential district we call Corktown today is but a remnant of the much larger district that was largely demolished by urban renewal after World War II. Entire blocks of small houses gave way to the light industrial and warehouse park that we see there today.

And as Ford moves in to more and more sites — including, one can only hope, the Michigan Central Station — Corktown will evolve yet again.

Those who believe Detroit enjoyed some ideal mythical time that we should return to — some evocative year when neighborhoods like Corktown were "just right" — need to get over it. History is flow, and cities grow and change in a process that never stops.

Tuesday's groundbreaking in Corktown was the latest proof of that. As Mayor Mike Duggan said at the groundbreaking, "We're just going to keep on going, a neighborhood at a time, to rebuild the city."

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.