It's technically next to the convention center, but it's on the wrong side of it. It would just be so you could advertise the hotel as being connected, but the actual connection would be awkward.
I think the appeal of the site is that it's off to the side of downtown, but connected to it by the People Mover. And of course it's on the riverfront. I feel like that's particularly appealing for residential, for people who might both work and socialize downtown, but who at the end of the day want to go home to someplace different, and somewhere a bit quieter.
Also, Detroit doesn't really have the modern highrise living that's standard in other big cities. For a long time people thought there wasn't demand for anything downtown, but as things have been built, it's turned out that there was demand for downtown all along but it was being masked by the fact that what people wanted wasn't available for them to show demand for. It's like a restaurant having microwaved frozen pizza on their menu and concluding there was no demand for pizza when no one ever ordered it. So I think this building will reveal there are a lot of people who want to live in a new modern tower with a view, and previously weren't considering Detroit because what they wanted didn't exist.
Also, the rendering makes this building look short but it's about the same height as Riverfront Towers and the shorter Ren Cen towers.
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Originally Posted by seabee1526
Won’t The Q be down there by then?
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You can't run a streetcar mixed in traffic through a highway interchange, so it's not possible to extend the QLine to this area.
You'd have to remove the freeway and completely rebuild the road infrastructure. And then once you did that, if there were to be a QLine extension on the west side of downtown it would make more sense to go down Michigan.
Personally I think the city needs to proactively do some long term planning work for that area. I think any development there should not prevent the freeway from being removed, 3rd being reconnected (either as a bridge or with freeway removal), rail being rebuilt for a passenger rail station either at the JLA garage or even underneath the convention center, and a People Mover extension.