Are there enough people to fill downtown Detroit condos, apartments?

So many new residential units are being built in the greater downtown Detroit that the question naturally arises: Are there really people to fill them all?

So far, the answer has been "yes." With millennials pouring into the city to work for Quicken Loans and other employers, newly opened residential projects in the greater downtown continue to fill up quickly.

DuCharme Place, an 185-unit apartment building that opened last year near Lafayette Park east of downtown is full and runs a small waiting list — a typical result with projects like the Scott on Woodward or the Broderick Tower on Grand Circus Park.

That brisk absorption continues to encourage new development. It's a rare week downtown that doesn't see at least one groundbreaking or announcement.

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Last Tuesday, Larson Realty Group broke ground for its 111-unit apartment and retail project at Michigan and Trumbull, on the site of the old Tiger Stadium. Just two days later, Develop Detroit, a nonprofit developer backed by JPMorgan Chase and other lenders, broke ground on its project to rehab or build 70 houses in the North End district, just north of New Center.

Businessman Dan Gilbert's Bedrock real estate arm has at least 1,500 new residential units either under construction or in near-term planning in the greater downtown area. Those include Bedrock's remaking of several older office towers into mostly residential use, including the Book Tower, the old Detroit Free Press Building and the David Stott Building.

Bedrock is also building new residential units in its mixed-use projects on the Hudson's site, on the Monroe Block, and in Brush Park at its City Modern project.

And Bedrock isn't alone. The Ilitch family's Olympia development last year announced six residential projects near Little Caesars Arena, a mix of renovations of older buildings and new construction, with hundreds of units in the works. Construction has yet to begin on those projects.

Yet that's just a partial list. The total of new apartments and condos either recently opened, under construction or in planning pushes toward 5,000 units. And that in a downtown virtually abandoned as recently as 15 to 20 years ago.

Many developers scoff at the idea that the greater downtown is getting overbuilt. David DiRita, a partner in the Roxbury Group, which has completed several projects including a renovation of the David Whitney Building, said its residential projects continue to fill up.

"We’re still not at the numbers down here that a metropolitan area of our size can support," DiRita said. "I think we’ve got a lot of room to run still."

Walter Cohen, a Southfield-based developer who last year opened the DuCharme Place project, strikes a somewhat more cautionary tone.

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"It's a lot easier to announce a development than to actually get it built," said Cohen, a veteran of 40 years building in Detroit. "If you listen to all the announcements, then (downtown) would temporarily be a little bit overbuilt. But I'm not sure all of the announcements will actually get built. So it may well be about balance."

Aside from the residential market, the downtown boom has raised some fears of overbuilding in other markets. So many new restaurants have opened in and around downtown recently that a bubble probably exists. Some operators find it hard to find enough kitchen and wait staff, and some popular places have already closed.

Then, too, construction of new office and retail space proceeds much more cautiously than residential development. Indeed, Gilbert's Hudson's site project is the first speculative office tower to be built downtown since the early 1990s, a quarter-century ago. The Ilitches' Olympia Development recently announce several office and mixed-use projects but those are yet to start.

But for now, the residential boom sees no end in sight.

Raw numbers alone never tell the story. Consider Toronto, where new development can seem all but out of control. Dozens of construction cranes stand on the downtown skyline, and the city adds an astonishing 20,000 new condo units each year. Yet despite that flood of new units, the demand remains insatiable.

That demand has been fed by a robust economy, low mortgage rates, brisk immigration that swells the population, and the fact that even at an average price of $730,000 (Canadian) for a new condo, units remain affordable compared to single-family houses in greater Toronto that cost more than $1 million.

Dana Senagama, principal market analyst with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., a quasi-public body that supports housing markets, said close to 90% of the new condos in Toronto are sold well before construction is finished, and buyers often wait years for their unit after paying for it.

"The strong demand has not been met with the right amount of supply," Senagama said. "Supply’s the biggest issue in this market."

Detroit, of course, sees nowhere near that level of demand now. But it did see a market that brisk a century ago, when the city exploded across the landscape with the growth of the automotive industry.

Detroit's population, just 300,000 in 1900, tripled to 1 million by 1920 and then nearly doubled again by 1950. The city annexed the bulk of its land area between 1900 and 1926, and hundreds of thousands of residential units — everything from shacks to mansions — were built.

Many cities in the Sun Belt — Houston, Dallas, Phoenix — have seen post-World War II growth patterns almost as dramatic.

So what's happening in the greater downtown Detroit today may be less unusual than it seems. Brisk periods of growth are common to most cities once the right moment arrives.

But how much more growth can greater downtown Detroit absorb? By some measures, quite a lot.

For one thing, even in the immediate downtown area within the ring of expressways, roughly half of the more than 800 parcels have no buildings on them, serving mostly as surface parking lots. That provides a lot of room to grow before land becomes scarce.

And by the standards of many other post-industrial cities, Detroit is still just beginning its comeback.

"Of course we’re going to have as many people living in our downtown as Cleveland, and we’re a third of the way there," DiRita said.

So fears of overbuilding the downtown area may be premature, at least for now. The next recession might chill things, sharply rising prices could dent demand, and marginal projects with dicey financing can always go bust.

But even citing those possibilities feels like a silver lining looking for a cloud. For now, the end of the downtown residential boom still looks a long way off.

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