Real Estate Forum - October 2013

units, and St. Louis-based McCormack Baron Salazar’s $55-million Rivertown development, which will brings hundreds of new apartments, many of them affordable, to the riverfront just east of GM.

In addition to refurbishing its existing campus, last year DTE bought an abandoned Salvation Army building and has begun making plans to transform some nearby land, perhaps into a neighborhood farmers’ market.

But Nuno says DTE also wants to make
sure all of the corporations in the neighbor-
hood sit down together and “think about
this strategically and not in silos. It’s not
something we can do alone.”
The migration started by Compuware,
Quicken and others should continue. Lowe
Campbell Ewald, a national marketing
agency, plans to move about 600 employees
out of suburban Warren by early 2014 and
take roughly 120,000 square feet of space in
the Ford Field Office Complex. The move
will give the agency a chance to revamp its
business environment and bring it up to
modern standards, says CEO Jim Palmer.

“People wanted a better working envi-
ronment. We studied a lot of buildouts at
other agencies, and even though it’s going
to be a bit of a culture shock, we’ve been
behind cubes and hidden in offices for too
long. People need to feed off other peo-
ple’s excitement.”
The agency’s new home in the complex’s
old J.L. Hudson Warehouse will have an
open, collaborative design, with most work-
ers sitting together. The building features a
floor-to-ceiling atrium and “you can look
across the five floors of the agency and see
all the work being done.”
The agency’s present offices were
designed in the 1970s, and the company
had long planned to shift away from a
traditional office environment, but
choosing a downtown location simplified
the transition.
“We could have done this in the suburbs,
but probably not as easily.” For one thing,
the suburbs did not have the same range of
choices. Whereas, after sifting through the
available downtown space, “we had a dozen
different ways of doing it.” The firm could
have reconfigured a high-rise space, for
example, but ultimately decided that the
rehabbed warehouse with its light, space
Real estate Midwest...continued on p75
dte energy has been a fixture in downtown detroit
for decades, but it has recommitted to its neighbor-
hood by buying an abandoned salvation army
building (foreground) with plans to redevelop it.