GM is leaving the RenCen. It can't become Detroit's next ruin. | Opinion

The Packard Plant, hulking and toxic, 80 buildings looming derelict across 80 acres of Detroit's east side since the last Packard rolled off the line in 1956.

Fisher Body No. 21, 600,000 deteriorating square feet at the curve of I-75 and I-94, abandoned since 1993.

Continental Motors on Jefferson Avenue, empty since the late 1990s, finally demolished in 2022.

In Highland Park, the stately, sprawling Ford Model T administrative building, where production stopped in 1974.

Detroit is littered with the auto industry's husks. The Renaissance Center can't be next.

General Motors headquarters will move to Dan Gilbert's Hudson's building

General Motors announced Monday that in 2025, it will leave the RenCen, where it has been headquartered since 1996, for Dan Gilbert's new Hudson's building. GM President Mary Barra told reporters that GM won't sell the RenCen. The complex has other tenants, including a thriving Marriott Hotel, but GM owns most of the RenCen and is its primary occupant.

Barra and Gilbert, the billionaire founder of Quicken Loans, told reporters yesterday that the automaker will work with developers to find an alternate use for the RenCen. Balanced against the industry's history of abandonment, it's a vague assurance.

It's nearly inconceivable a complex the size of the RenCen could become derelict. But you could have said the same of the Packard Plant or Fisher Body (a GM subsidiary when it closed) or the Model T plant.

I believe neither Barra nor Gilbert intends to let the seven-tower complex become vacant or derelict. But I expect the Packard brothers and Continental Motors and Ford thought the same.

GM must make good on its pledge to find a new purpose for the RenCen — or tear the buildings down.

What the automaker can't do is walk away, and leave the rest of us to live with its mess.

Another crossroads for downtown Detroit

GM has been teasing a move out of the RenCen since at least 2009, when the state ponied up about $2.6 million in tax credits after the bankrupt automaker threatened to move to Warren. It's not clear how many GM workers are currently assigned to the RenCen. The automaker plans to downsize its office space significantly, my colleague JC Reindl reported, taking just two office floors in the new Hudson's building, each about 50,000 square feet.

More on the RenCen move: GM will relocate headquarters from RenCen to Detroit's new Hudson's building

This is where I have to give obligatory credit to GM: At least they're staying in Detroit. The Hudson's building is filling an important gap downtown, and it's far more accessible than the RenCen; the tower complex's design largely isolates it from the rest of downtown.

Times are tough for office buildings these days. The vacancy rate, the Free Press reported yesterday, is around 19%, compared to 13% before the pandemic, but those numbers don't tell the real story. At least some of that space is still nominally occupied by businesses, but not by workers, who went home in March 2020 and mostly never came back.

Winning the 15-year GM lease is a major coup for Gilbert, who started construction at the Hudson's site before the pandemic devastated the office market. Few of the buildings Gilbert owns downtown are close to full these days. (I know, I work in one.) The automaker will be the Hudson's building anchor tenant. GM may hope its new space lures some workers back, but the amount of space the automaker is leasing suggests it has given up the fight to entice most workers to return to the office.

In the grand post-pandemic re-shaping of downtown, this is a shell game: Tenants for Hudson's, vacancy for the RenCen. With the market for office space still on the skids, the GM's departure will certainly spell the beginning of the end for the RenCen, and pose a new problem for downtown.

Detroit's RenCen history dates to 1977: Key facts about GM's downtown HQ

Deciding the RenCen's fate can't take decades

I'm fond of the RenCen. When I see its cheerily lit towers, driving north on I-75, I know I'm home. When I lived in the Pavilion apartments, a high-rise in Detroit's Lafayette Park, I learned that every night at midnight, the building's illuminated logo blinks off for just a few seconds. I gauged how serious snow or fog was by whether I could see the RenCen towers.

But the building has always been impractical. It's a giant doorstop separating Detroit from the river, and navigating the interior is like wandering through an M.C. Escher painting.

Downtown residential occupancy remains high, and converting office space to condos or apartments is all the rage these days. That's something Barra and Gilbert will certainly explore, but the RenCen, all told, is 5.5 million square feet spread across seven towers. Repurposing it for anything will be a costly endeavor.

The Packard Plant is finally being demolished. Fisher Body is in the early stages of redevelopment. The Continental plant was eventually torn down.

All of it took decades.

If the RenCen has got to go, don't drag it out. We don't need another hulking ruin, reminding us all over again that in Detroit, we can never climb up quite far enough.

Nancy Kaffer is editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Contact her at nkaffer@freepress.com. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may run it in print or online.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: GM is leaving Renaissance Center. Detroit doesn't need another ruin.