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Originally Posted by LMich
You actually said it better, Fvn. The project is still very much on the schedule it was planned on when that schedule was released last year. As you said, this one has required quite a bit of foundation work. There has been constant construction since they cleared away the garage, which was a project in and of itself.
People need to stop pushing false information that this is dragging. Like any project, it could very well get killed in a recession. That hasn't happened, and the project is not behind schedule. The only unsual thing about this project is its sheer height and the site, but that obviously hasn't complicated much of anything. There is this bizarre narrative by the impatient that nothing is going on. Bedrock is not wasting millions of dollars in construction equipment and man-hours to push around dirt to keep up appearances. No developer does that, and Dan Gilbert sure as hell isn't the kind of guy who'd do something like that.
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That's partly the fault of Dan Gilbert's own communication style. He likes to hype up projects and usually announces his moves a short time before they're started making them seem like it happened overnight.
Even Gilbert himself said "There's been two buildings higher than twenty-five stories that have been constructed in downtown Detroit since the 1980s. Two!" Gilbert said at an event at the North American International Auto Show. " I think you'll see ten or fifteen of those in the next five to seven years that are built."
That was in 2017. Granted that's only two years since hes made that statement, but it may have been an ill-worded one since the only couple of new high rises with any certainty of being built are his; Hudson's and the Monroe Block. That's all fine and dandy, but his statement can be interpreted as if he was expecting or wanted to create the expectation a high rise boom was coming to Detroit. Was he hinting that a lot of the new high rise projects would be his? Maybe he figured other developers would hop into the city?
Either way, he himself kind of got everyone all excited like Detroit is about to ramp up speed but then reality sets in and although Hudson's is "on-schedule" after a year from groundbreaking, it and the Monroe Block are the only two high rise projects (or rather anything above 25 stories) anyone can focus on.
And I can go on a whole separate tangent about the "tenant tease" that seemingly hypes the project up even more because some mysterious big-name company wants to create a presence in Detroit but also keep it a secret because... excitement?
Whatever, the project is "on-schedule" but the PR is all over the place and that makes it easy for people to wonder what's going on behind the scenes. We're supposed to be excited but they're also taking their time because they want to make it perfect but then I guess we're just supposed to be happy anything is happening at all because there's a risk the project won't be perfect and people will lose faith in the city? Okay.