Big meetings and big decisions are about to
be had and made for Dearborn's
biggest pending project, the redevelopment of the old Montgomery Ward's site.Representatives of the city-designated
developer, Southfield-based Redico, will
meet with the officials from Oakwood Healthcare
System and Midwest Health Services later this month to nail out final details
for the development. The general plan is for Redico to raze the structure at
the corner of Michigan Avenue
and Schafer Road
to build office space for Oakwood and Midwest Health Services.
"If that all goes well, it will come
before the city council in March," says Mary
Laundroche, the director of the department of public information for Dearborn. "If it all
goes well they will reach a development agreement and everything will go from
there."
That seems tantalizingly close for a complicated
project that has experienced fits and starts over the last few years. The
development has morphed from redeveloping the 1937 building's 93,000 square
feet into office space to razing it so Redico can build a 125,000-square-foot, three-story,
mixed-use building in its place. The latest plan promises to create hundreds of
news jobs, thousands of square feet of new retail space and dozens of new homes
in the city's core.
About 20,000 square feet of ground-floor
retail space will also be at that corner and along Schaefer. A 500-space
parking deck will be built behind the new building and 100 to 120 units of
senior citizen apartments will be built behind that so it melds in with the
surrounding neighborhood filled with single-family homes.
Work on the main structure is expected to
wrap up in 2009. The senior-citizen housing is expected to take a little longer.
Source: Mary Laundroche, the director of
the department of public information for Dearborn
Writer: Jon Zemke
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