Redevelopment vision for Uniroyal site in Detroit ends after 19 years

A nearly two-decade-old vision for redeveloping the old Uniroyal site along the Detroit riverfront with housing has come to an end.

Members of the Detroit Brownfield Redevelopment Authority voted late Wednesday to end a development agreement for the 44-acre site just west of the bridge to Belle Isle. The deal dates to 2005 and involved NFL running back Jerome Bettis — a Detroit native — as a lead developer.

The plan originally called for some 2,000 town houses and apartments and a potential hotel, and more recent iterations have also called for commercial space.

The site has intrigued would-be developers since the Uniroyal tire factory shut down in 1980, including former President Donald Trump, who flew over it in a helicopter in 1986.

The city still holds title to the land, and since the 2005 deal, a 14-acre portion of the site was environmentally remediated at a cost of over $30 million, a cost primarily handled by DTE Energy, a development official said Wednesday.

Separate from the deal, a segment of the Detroit RiverWalk was built through the site and dedicated last year .

But Bettis' development team didn't meet an April 30 development deadline for the first of the project's three phases, development officials said. That deadline was in a 2023 amendment to the original deal.

So city officials recently reached an "amicable resolution" with Bettis' team. The resolution scraps the development deal and provides a $900,000 payment to Bettis' team as compensation for the significant time and money they spent over the years, according to David Howell, vice president of real estate services for the Detroit Economic Growth Corp.

“Both sides agreed to terminate," Howell said. "And the mutual resolution avoids any potential, prolonged costly litigation, which would leave the site idle and tied up for a number of years."

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Detroit developer Roderick Hardamon joined up with Bettis' team about two years ago as a development consultant and adviser on the Uniroyal project.

"We all came to the collective conclusion that given where the city was and the project was, that it was a reasonable time to terminate the agreement and give the city a chance to take a fresh perspective," Hardamon said Wednesday night.

Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com . Follow him on X @ jcreindl .

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Redevelopment vision for Uniroyal site in Detroit ends after 19 years