Another broken promise in the Ilitches' District Detroit. Color me surprised.

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30-01-2025

Knock knock.
Who's there?
The Ilitches.
The Ilitches who?
The Ilitches who aren't going to build affordable housing in the District Detroit, no matter how much public money we give them, but who knows, maybe they'll ask for more tax breaks anyway, I wouldn't put it past them, would you?
This joke would be funnier if we weren't the punchline.
In pursuit of public subsidies for its Little Caesars Arena and District Detroit projects, it seems the fabulously wealthy Ilitch family's Olympia Development will promise just about anything to the City of Detroit and the State of Michigan: to hire a workforce of 51% Detroiters to complete its projects, to build something other than parking lots around its new arena, to make 20% of the new housing it pledged to construct affordable.
And, it seems, there's just about no promise the Ilitch family won't break.
More: Officials strip affordable housing requirement for first District Detroit building
In 2013, the Ilitches talked their way to $324 million in public subsidies for the $863 million arena, pitched as 50 blocks of retail, office space and housing. But the auxiliary projects — the stuff around the arena that justified the subsides — didn't happen. Nor did the promise to hire a majority-Detroit workforce. Olympia built an arena, a business school named after family patriarch Mike Ilitch, a lot of parking, paid $2.9 million in fines for reneging on its workforce promises, but still managed to get an additional $74 million in subsidies for 'leveraging' investment.
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.
Thanks to Detroit's community benefits ordinance, a council of citizen volunteers negotiated a deal, signed by Olympia, that included hiring Detroiters, and ensuring that regular folks would have access to the new apartment buildings by designating 20% of units across the development as affordable housing for 30 years, renting below market rate and reserved for tenants who earn less than 50% of the area median income — $33,600 each year for an individual or $47,950 for a family of four — and to accept Section 8 vouchers. The financial arrangement is offset by the public subsidies promised in return, and really, a small price to pay for $800 million in future tax benefits.
Or so you'd think.
This week, the Michigan Strategic Fund gave Olympia permission to ignore the affordable housing requirement the companies had agreed to, just two years before, in order to obtain a $615 million Transformational Brownfield Credit for the construction of an 18-story, 261-unit residential building at 2205 Cass Ave. The building will be next to the also-under-construction University of Michigan Center for Innovation, and the university plans to lease the entire thing for student housing, a siting decision it's hard to imagine wasn't in the works before Olympia agreed to the affordable housing requirement.
Not to fret, says Olympia — they'll simply shift the promised affordable housing at 2205 Cass to the additional buildings it plans to (someday) build in the District Detroit.
If you buy that, I've got a tax subsidy I'd like to pitch you.
More from Freep Opinion: Detroiters have little choice in Ilitch project ― and it feels like deja vu
Here's where I'd normally recap the tortured history of the Ilitch family's promises to build things in exchange for tax benefits, but honestly, it's exhausting: Just picture Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, all the way back to 1994, the first time the Ilitches promised to transform Detroit in exchange for tax incentives (back then, it was Comerica Park and a casino district).
It's not that the Ilitches don't do any of the things they say they will. We've got a baseball stadium and a hockey arena, and there's no arguing that part of Detroit is objectively better than it was 30 years ago, when broad scale disinvestment left Woodward Avenue lined with empty and deteriorating storefronts. And they're partnering with Cinnaire Solutions, a nonprofit community development organization with a track record of accomplishments in affordable housing, to rehab seven low-income apartment buildings at Henry Street and Cass Avenue, just behind the arena. The companies say 49% of those units will be low-income, and accommodate the buildings' existing tenants.
But the Ilitches 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. Which would be fine, except they want public money to do it.
The subsidies the Ilitches receive aren't blank checks, but either exemption from future tax payments or, thanks to a new law, the ability to capture taxes paid by residents and workers in its buildings, a kind of feudal tax arrangement that deprives the state and city of the normal bump in tax revenue that comes with new development. If 20% of the apartments in the planned 10-building development are filled with current Detroit residents paying below market rates, the company will also receive forgiveness for a $24 million loan from the Downtown Development Authority.
In exchange for waiving the affordable housing requirement at 2025 Cass, the Michigan Strategic Fund cut the amount of payroll taxes Olympia can collect to 50%, the Free Press' JC Reindl reported this week, and the company may lose some local subsidies, as well. This is a modicum of accountability, but it's more than the company has ever been asked to accept, so I suppose we can call it progress.
It's customary to note that the Ilitch family believed in Detroit when few did, renovating the Fox Theatre (in 1988) and keeping its Red Wings and Detroit Tigers in the city even as the Pistons and the Lions moved to the suburbs (although not averse to letting the threat of relocation loom during subsidy negotiations).
But it's not wrong to hope for more, or to be frustrated when it doesn't materialize — with the Ilitches, and with elected or appointed officials who allow this to happen, again and again and again.
Detroit needs the Ilitches. They own too much of our city, and are famously averse to selling, or even, at times, renovating. Ilitch-owned properties have racked up their share of blight tickets, and scion Chris Ilitch admitted in 2014 that while pursuing the arena plans, the family sat on some properties for a decade or more.
I can't pretend to know what it's like to be Chris Ilitch. I imagine it's easy to look at the tangible legacy your family has constructed, and brush off complaints that you haven't done enough as whining from the ungrateful. But I have to believe that no one can devote this many years to Detroit, this much time and attention, without caring about this place. And I hope that means listening to what the people who live here are trying to say.
Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Contact: [e-mail]. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters and we may publish it online and in print.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Another broken promise in the Ilitches' District Detroit | Opinion