Many years ago, the late Mike Ilitch was very influential in reviving a section of Detroit. Thereafter, the Ilitch family continues to screw over Detroit time and time and time again. The first screwing came in the 1990’s. Metro Times wrote a fantastic article detailing the Ilitch business model during this time. Ilitch would buy roughly 70 properties and do nothing with them. Consequently, the property values went way down and through a city redevelopment deal, the Ilitch family was then able to buy up more property for cheap.
But in 2012, the Ilitch family proposed “District Detroit”. This project would make downtown Detroit the “epicenter of sports and entertainment in the heart of the city”. This project would build what exactly? To start with, a new arena for the Detroit Red Wings and Detroit Pistons. But more importantly was the promise of “hundreds of new affordable and market-rate rental housing units”. The Ilitch family proclaimed that this project would be “Detroit’s largest single announcement of new apartment units, affordable units and redeveloped historic buildings in more than 20 years”. Then there was the economic impact of District Detroit being “more than $2 billion by 2020”. The price of this project to taxpayers started at $320 million. But when you factor in that this deal gave 40 properties to the Ilitch family for $1? Or that the city recently gave up their contractual entitlement to a financial cut of the Arena revenues?
The problem with this entire plan was that the Ilitch family had no plans on doing anything but build their new arena. Well, let me rephrase that last sentence. They had no plans on doing anything that helped the city or cost the Ilitch family any amount of money. Fast-forward to 2018 and everyone could see how little the Ilitch family had gotten done. This is what happens when a massive deal like this doesn’t include any oversight or clawbacks.
When a Guardian reporter went to a game in Detroit at the new arena, she passed by a sign that promoted the area around the arena as having a “dynamic mix of shopping and dining…(with) places to live in the heart of the action”. The issue with this sign is that the Guardian reporter could see that there were “few places to live in the District and little to eat”. This is because the only thing found in these areas were “vacant, decaying buildings” that went on for “entire city blocks”.
“The project began in 2013 when the Ilitches unveiled plans to revive the area between Detroit’s now-thriving mid- and downtowns. Their ambitious vision included a 50-block sports and entertainment neighborhood called The District Detroit, anchored by the 20,000-seat LCA. The Ilitches promised $200m in development around the arena, claiming new housing, stores, restaurants, bars and offices would bloom…The surrounding neighborhood that justified the huge tax deal never materialized, so The District largely remains a redevelopment deadzone. Instead of gaining luxury lofts, it’s lost housing, and the Ilitches have only renovated a small fraction of the hundreds of properties its companies purchased here” — Guardian, 10/08/18
Before 2018 began, the Ilitch family had gotten many things done. Let’s go over some of them:
A few months into 2023, the Ilitch family decided that they had no gotten enough taxpayer money out of the city and state. So the city of Detroit gave them “significant savings on property taxes for the next 30 years”. You may be wondering why the city is giving them a tax break? Well, these tax savings, according to the city, will “be used to fund the development of the District Detroit project”. Excuse me? The project that the Ilitch family got millions for previously and did nothing? Some estimate that the total subsidy given to the Ilitch family totals $800M, which is half of the projects $1.5B cost.
Today, I came across an article in the Detroit Free Press that shocked me, even though I should not have been remotely surprised. As I said in the paragraph above this line, in 2023, Detroit gave the Ilitch family a second round of taxpayer money in exchange for finishing District Detroit.
“In 2023, the family, now partnering with Stephen Ross’ Related Cos., came back for a second round of subsidies — $800 million this time, again, about half of the project’s $1.5 billion total cost — to complete the work they said they’d do back in 2013: namely, build housing and office space in the area around the arena…This week, the Michigan Strategic Fund gave Olympia permission to ignore the affordable housing requirement the companies had agreed to” — Detroit Free Press, 01/30/25
The Free Press article summarizes it perfectly when they noted how the Ilitch family “tend to do only the things that offer direct benefit to the family’s business operations, like building an arena and a sea of parking lots”.
STOP GIVING THEM TAXPAYER MONEY WITH ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY.
