For me, the debate over the future of the Renaissance Center is deeply personal.
Nearly 30 years ago, I had the privilege of being the lead development officer for the repositioning of the Renaissance Center after General Motors acquired it and made it the company’s global headquarters. I know these buildings. I know their history, their challenges and their importance to Detroit’s skyline. I also know how much effort went into trying to correct some of the fundamental shortcomings of the original design.
Today, as I lead the Downtown Detroit Partnership, an organization that has served this city for more than a century, I look at the Renaissance Center through another lens: not simply as a collection of buildings, but as an enormously important influence on Detroit’s future.
That history is precisely why I believe we need to have an honest conversation about what comes next.
When GM purchased the Renaissance Center in 1996, the company ultimately invested more than $1 billion in the complex and surrounding riverfront. The initial approximately $500 million renovation removed massive exterior concrete structures along Jefferson, created a new glass circulation system, built the Wintergarden and made the complex significantly more accessible. GM’s subsequent investment helped create GM Plaza and the first phase of what became the Detroit Riverwalk.
We accomplished a great deal, but we could not change the fundamental DNA of a complex conceived in the 1970s as an inward-looking development separated from the traditional street grid and core of our city.
For decades, Detroiters have described the Renaissance Center as an island. Jefferson Avenue separates it from the activity and growth of downtown. Its enormous podium separates people from the river. Navigating the complex has never been intuitive. And despite the improvements made over the years, one of the most extraordinary waterfronts of any American city has never achieved its full potential as a truly public place.
We now have an opportunity to change that.
The proposal being advanced by General Motors and Bedrock would remove the massive podium and two of the five original towers closest to the river, preserve and repurpose the three principal remaining towers, and fundamentally reconnect Downtown Detroit to its waterfront. The broader plan now under public review encompasses the Renaissance Center and East Riverfront and contemplates approximately 18 acres of new public space, housing, hospitality, office, retail, entertainment and improved connections to the Riverwalk. Current projections include approximately 934 apartments, roughly 250 of them affordable, along with 675,000 square feet of modernized office space.
The demolition of two towers understandably troubles people. It should.
Buildings of this scale and architectural significance should never be removed casually. Preservation advocates have made legitimate arguments about the Renaissance Center’s place in Detroit’s architectural and civic history. Those concerns deserve respect and serious consideration.
But preservation also must confront today’s realities.
The relevant question isn’t simply, “Can we save all four office towers?”
The questions are: Who will occupy them, who will pay to convert them, and what is the economically sustainable use that keeps them active for the next 50 years?
Detroit does not have millions of square feet of unfulfilled office demand waiting for the Renaissance Center. CBRE reported an overall Detroit office vacancy rate of 19.4% in the second quarter of 2026. That is not an argument against Detroit. It is recognition of a structural change occurring in office markets throughout America.
Nor is residential conversion a simple answer. Bedrock says it studied that alternative and estimates that converting the two riverfront office towers proposed for removal would cost roughly $800 million for those two buildings alone. That is $800 per square foot more than twice the cost of traditional residential development.
Detroiters benefit from strong emotional ties to our history, but we need to balance these emotions with fact-based assessments. We should not compare the proposed plan with a hypothetical future in which somebody simply arrives and fills millions of square feet of obsolete office space. We should compare it with the realistic alternatives including the very real danger of prolonged vacancy, deterioration or demolition.
Detroit knows that story too well.
Michigan Central Station ultimately became one of America’s great preservation success stories because Ford Motor Company made an extraordinary commitment to it. But before that happened, one of Detroit’s greatest architectural landmarks sat vacant for decades. We should celebrate how that story ended while remembering how long Detroit lived with the uncertainty that preceded it.
There is another aspect to this discussion that I believe is being underestimated: public space.
Detroit possesses one of the greatest natural assets of any major American city, the Detroit River which we have spent two decades reclaiming. The Riverwalk has transformed our relationship with it and today attracts millions of visits annually. What was once largely an industrial and inaccessible waterfront has increasingly become Detroit’s front porch.
Removing two towers and the podium is therefore not simply subtraction. It can create acres of publicly accessible waterfront, reconnect Downtown’s street network to the river, improve access to the Riverwalk and allow people to experience the water in ways the existing Renaissance Center physically prevents.
We have every right to ask: What are we receiving in return? What commitments are enforceable? What public spaces are permanently public? What are the economic assumptions? What happens if those assumptions are wrong?
But we should also recognize the extraordinary scale of the private capital being contemplated and the reality that this redevelopment does not generate the conventional return normally required to justify an investment.
Dan has demonstrated repeatedly that he is willing to invest in Detroit with a time horizon measured not simply in quarterly returns, but in future generations. Bedrock and its affiliates have invested or committed billions of dollars across Downtown Detroit. In the case of the Renaissance Center, I believe the motivation has to be seen from a civic and philanthropic context: creating value for the city that extends well beyond the financial return generated by the project.
And community engagement must remain fundamental.
Detroiters should help determine what happens on their waterfront. The current Community Benefits Ordinance process establishes a Neighborhood Advisory Council and a formal series of public meetings, while the development team has opened a community hub and is conducting additional outreach.
But authentic engagement requires responsibility on all sides.
Community input should challenge assumptions and improve the plan. But ultimately the choices before us have to be evaluated against feasible alternatives.
I have spent much of my professional life working on Downtown Detroit. I was there when we repositioned the Renaissance Center for General Motors nearly three decades ago. I have watched Campus Martius Park transform the heart of Downtown. I have watched our riverfront evolve from an underutilized edge of the city into one of Detroit’s most beloved public spaces. And I have seen what happens when committed public, private and philanthropic partners are willing to think beyond the immediate economics of a project.
That experience has taught me something. Great cities cannot be preserved for all time. They have to evolve.
Sometimes preservation means saving a building. Sometimes it means adapting it. And sometimes it means making a difficult choice about part of the physical past to ensure a viable future.
The Renaissance Center was itself an audacious bet on Detroit’s future nearly 50 years ago. General Motors made another enormous bet on it when the company moved its headquarters there in the 1990s.
Our responsibility today is not to recreate either of those moments. It is to ask what this extraordinary place needs to become for the chapter in Detroit’s history.
If we can preserve the defining silhouette of the Renaissance Center, bring new residents and visitors to it, create exceptional public space along the Detroit River, reconnect Downtown to its waterfront, generate economic activity and ensure that this landmark remains alive rather than becoming an enormous monument to an earlier era, then we will have accomplished something much more important than simply saving buildings.
We will have preserved the Renaissance Center’s original purpose.
A belief in Detroit’s future.
