Name another city in the world that has a multibillionaire — in this case, Dan Gilbert, founder and chairman of Rocket Cos. — who has acquired some 100 major properties in the central business district, invested billions of dollars in redevelopment efforts while maintaining everything to Class A standards, and is working to reduce blight and prevent crime.
Welcome to present-day Detroit.
By any stretch, Gilbert’s investment in the city is unprecedented. Not since its founding in 1701, save for the last century’s Roaring Twenties, has the municipality seen such confidence and investment in its future.
But the turnaround doesn’t stop there. The mortgage originator is joined by five other billionaires who, together, are restoring forlorn historic structures and turning them into functional residences and offices, giving feral land and surface parking lots new uses, and working hand in hand with the city to convert a concrete jungle into a well-lit, landscaped metropolis. Not only that, but they’ve also built three sports stadiums that draw in hundreds of thousands of sports and entertainment fans each year.
Detroit also boasts one of the largest collections of historic theaters in the country, serves as both the center of the automotive and mortgage industries, possesses a manufacturing base that’s the envy of the world, and has one of the largest concentrations of single-family homes in the nation.
“Detroit will pass Silicon Valley” in the future of the auto industry, Mayor Mike Duggan said during his most recent State of the City address. He also touted the work of hundreds of businesses, civic organizations, and community groups that are remaking the city, including the addition of hundreds of units of affordable housing in some of Detroit’s most desirable enclaves and rejuvenated neighborhoods.
Today, in a town that built the world’s first manufacturing economy — save for the redevelopment of the Packard Plant — the city has filled nearly every available industrial parcel.
A variety of projects are underway. Stellantis is building four new trucks and SUVs at its massive Conner Avenue Plant, while the site of the old Hudson automotive plant along Conner Street, which was demolished, is now home to a Lear light assembly facility.
General Motors has an electric vehicle center near Hamtramck, and Ford is spending $940 million to convert the old Michigan Central train station into a mobility innovation campus.
“We’ve got to give back individually and collectively … and in Michigan and in Detroit, it’s something we know how to do,” Roger Penske, chairman of Penske Corp. in Bloomfield Township, told NBC Sports during the recent Detroit Grand Prix, held downtown in June for the first time in more than three decades. “It shows we’re committed. Someone needs to take that flag and run it down through town, and that’s what we’re trying to do as a company. We’re trying to give back to the city.”
The other five billionaires working to redo Detroit repeat the same mantra: The goal is to improve the city’s 139-square-mile boundary with a mixture of private investment and public subsidies, advance the neighborhoods at the direction of grassroots community groups, and make downtown Detroit a shining jewel that welcomes all.
Here, for the first time, is the playbook of how all six billionaires are working with local businesses, the city, civic groups, and residents to remake Detroit one block at a time.
Mike and Marian Illitch
With personal savings of $10,000 and another $15,000 they borrowed from family and friends, Mike and Marian Ilitch launched Little Caesars Pizza in 1959 in Garden City. The couple promised customers their orders would be ready in 15 minutes. Their widely successful “Pizza Pizza!” promotion was still on the horizon.
In their storefront’s small but cozy lobby in a strip center along Cherry Hill Road, the entrepreneurs offered a chair and a lamp, along with reading materials, for those who wanted to wait. Mike put in most of the hours perfecting and packaging his pizza recipes, while Marian raised seven children at their home in Dearborn Heights and used her self-taught financial skills to build an empire.
By 1962, when the first franchise opened in Warren, the pair were working to standardize the operation. Through family connections, they received financial support and mentorship from a pillar in the community — Frank Stella, founder and chairman of F.D. Stella Products Co., a restaurant kitchen supply and food service business in Detroit.
Stella helped stake the first 200 Little Caesars locations before the couple was able to finance what today is the third-largest pizza chain in the world. Estimated revenue in 2022, based on industry data, was more than $4.5 billion, with 5,500-plus locations worldwide (the company does not share financial and store information).
Longtime supporters of youth sports, especially hockey and baseball, Mike and Marian Ilitch took their business interests to the next level when, in 1982, they acquired the Detroit Red Wings for $8.5 million.
“I’ll never forget my first (hockey) trip,” Mike Ilitch said years later at the Hockey Hall of Fame. “The business meeting in New York with the NHL in 1982 — walking into a room full of businessmen with pizza sauce on my shirt, some flour in my hair, a bank statement in my hand. Several weeks later, I was the owner of the Detroit Red Wings.”
From there, the couple, mindful of their local roots, acquired the Fox Theatre and adjoining Fox Office Centre from Chuck Forbes. Pouring millions of dollars into a restoration, they moved the headquarters of Little Caesars, along with Olympia Entertainment, to the Fox in 1988, just as they were building a new office center in Farmington Hills. It was a significant gamble, given downtown Detroit had been losing businesses to the suburbs since the 1970s.
As the pizza operation continued to grow, the couple slowly but surely began turning around a long-struggling Red Wings team. Along the way, they turned their eye to baseball. In 1992, Little Caesars had revenue of more than $2 billion, the Red Wings won the division, and the Ilitchs acquired the Detroit Tigers for $85 million from Tom Monaghan, who owned Ann Arbor-based Domino’s Pizza.
Fueled by Stanley Cup victories in 1997 and 1998, along with Marian’s investment in the MotorCity Casino and Hotel (today she owns the operation outright), among other investments in food distribution, the couple, in partnership with a stadium authority, saw the construction of Comerica Park for the Detroit Tigers in 2000 and, in 2017, Little Caesars Arena for the Detroit Red Wings and Detroit Pistons (the latter owned by Tom Gores).
As the arena was being planned, the family — Mike, 87, passed away on Feb. 10, 2017, and his son, Christopher, was named president and CEO of what today is Ilitch Holdings Inc. — set out to restore and build across a 50-block area named The District Detroit. The family had long been acquiring property around the Fox Theatre with the goal of adding residences, offices, retail, restaurants, hotels, what is now the Wayne State University Mike Ilitch School of Business, and public spaces.
The $1.5-billion effort, underway in partnership with Detroit native Stephen Ross, chairman of Related Cos. in New York City, includes a hotel just south of Little Caesars Arena and another one inside the Fox Office Centre, since vacated by Little Caesars for a brand-new headquarters just south of the Fox.
In addition to new residences and four commercial office buildings, as well as the recently completed Columbia Street mixed-use entertainment district, there are plans to build the Detroit Center for Innovation behind the Fox; that development will be anchored by a $250-million, 200,000-square-foot research and education center operated by the University of Michigan. — R.J. King
Net Worth
Marian Ilitch: $4.3B
Source: Forbes
Roger Penske
On a Saturday afternoon in the mid-1990s, Roger Penske, then owner of Michigan International Speedway, welcomed a small group of reporters after the qualifying session for the next day’s Michigan 500, which was a grueling test for IndyCars.
As he showed off a collection of racing cars in a quiet corner of the facility, a napkin scudded over the pavement like a tiny meteorite in a vast galaxy. Ever the fastidious proprietor, Penske stooped to pocket the litter no one else had noticed.
That “Penske Perfect” moment prefigured his tasks to come for Detroit, which at the time had been buoyed by General Motors Co.’s announcement that the automaker had acquired the Renaissance Center and would move its headquarters there from New Center following a $500-million renovation.
But Penske knew more things were needed if the Motor City’s burgeoning renaissance was to take hold. He chaired the Downtown Detroit Partnership (2005 to 2010) and led Detroit’s Host Committee for organizing Super Bowl XL (2006). As part of the rollout, he helped supervise and finance a downtown cleanup campaign that continues to this day.
By the time he signed up for the DDP, Penske, now 86, had been looking after every operational detail of everything he came to be involved in since starting in business with a Chevrolet dealership in Philadelphia. He had pursued racing after graduating from Lehigh University and was so good, Sports Illustrated named him the SCCA Driver of the Year in 1961.
“I had to make a decision that was either going to be stay as a race driver or be in business,” he said upon being named to the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2019. With the dealership locked up in 1965, he wasted little time in starting his own racing team and entering the Trans-Am Series for “pony” cars and the Cam-Am Series for sports-prototype racers. Sports cars, stock cars, and IndyCars all would follow. Besides MIS, he also owned speedways in Pennsylvania and California.
Meanwhile, he built up the holdings of Penske Corp. Long based in Bloomfield Township, it employs more than 70,000 people in nine countries on four continents. The Penske Automotive Group sells about 5 percent of all the Ferraris that are produced, but will also get you into a Freightliner or Western Star truck. Other corporate units range from truck rental and leasing to the design of racing engines. Besides the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and NTT IndyCar Series, which were acquired in 2020, Penske Entertainment Corp. owns IMS Productions Inc. for TV broadcasts. Team Penske fields entries in IndyCar, NASCAR, and the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
Penske first raced Porsches and Chevrolet Corvettes. His newest initiative, Porsche Penske Motorsport, fields Porsche 963 sports-prototype racers in two distinct series, one in the U.S. and the other in Europe. Referring to “a true global partnership,” Penske said, “We have a long history with Porsche in sports-car racing, and we are excited about this new opportunity and the chance to add to our legacy together.”
Another highlight for Detroit, this past June, was the new downtown course for the NTT IndyCar Series’ Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix presented by Lear. Leaving Belle Isle after an interval that extended from 1989 to 2022, the Grand Prix returned to the urban streets where it started as a Formula 1 event some 41 years ago. Penske promised more excitement, and he and his team delivered with a street-festival feel, a small business village, and abundant, free streetside viewing. “I think fans are going to see some great racing and the access is going to be unprecedented,” he said.
Besides the multifarious business interests, Penske keeps up a high degree of civic involvement. One example is his support of M-1 Rail’s QLine trains on Woodward Avenue, along with the Kresge Foundation and Dan Gilbert’s Rocket Family of Cos. “He’s the chair of our board, and he remains committed to M-1 Rail and the QLine’s success,” says Lisa Nuszkowski, M-1 Rail’s president.
Later this year, the new 8,116-square-foot community center at Alfred Brush Ford Park, in the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood on Detroit’s east side near the Detroit River, will open as a replacement to the Lenox Center. Besides sports facilities, classrooms, and meeting spaces, the center is part of a $9 million park makeover. In 2019, Penske Corp. contributed $5 million to the Strategic Neighborhood Fund to help the project.
Beyond daily activities, the new center will be available to the community during emergency situations, providing phone-charging and internet access as well as serving as a cooling or a warming shelter.
His hands-on approach in racetracks, rail lines, and boardrooms keeps Penske moving. As a spokesman explained in an email last fall, “Between business travel, yearly reviews, budget meetings, the holidays, and other appearance commitments, there is hardly a moment that is unaccounted for on Mr. Penske’s schedule.” But the man himself proves game for whatever arises, saying, “My plan is to keep moving forward.” — Ronald Ahrens
Net Worth
Roger Penske: $3.2B
Source: Forbes
Dan Gilbert
Dan Gilbert reached an early personal peak on Aug. 14, 1983, when he was 21 years old. Driving a battered 1975 Chevrolet Camaro for Papa Romano’s in Southfield, he took advantage of what he later told DBusiness was a “crystal-clear, light-trafficked, everyone-having-their-money-ready, lucky night” and set a record by delivering 78 pizzas in one evening.
The moment may have been responsible for forming one of Gilbert’s basic principles. Detroit entrepreneur Ted Serbinski once summarized 24 such precepts in a DBusiness opinion piece: “Focus on making dollars, not saving cents. If you increase the top line, you’ll take care of your bottom line.”
Gilbert earned a bachelor’s degree in communications at Michigan State University and obtained a law degree from Wayne State University. With his brother, Gary, and two partners, he launched Rock Financial in 1985. In the 1990s, Rock Financial took advantage of the internet with innovative services through RockLoans.com and grew as a mortgage lender. Intuit Inc. purchased the company in 2000 and introduced the name Quicken Loans.
Two years later, Gilbert acquired Quicken, along with Title Source Inc., back from Intuit. He stayed out of the subprime lending that contributed to the 2008 global financial crisis.
Working on internal refinements paid off with unprecedented growth. As he told Serbinski in 2013, process improvement became an emphasis in consultation with front-line staff.
“At Quicken Loans, we have over 230 dedicated people to improve our processes. We’ve seen more growth in the last three years than the previous 25. We had zero (process-improvement personnel) in 2004.”
After the repurchase of Quicken Loans, Gilbert, now 61, made other acquisitions at an impressive rate. In 2007, he announced that Quicken would move from Livonia to downtown Detroit, and by the end of 2010 there were 3,600 employees in the city.
Moving allowed the company to centralize its operations, and it appealed to younger employees. He credited the moves that Mike and Marian Ilitch’s Little Caesar Enterprises Inc. and Peter Karmanos’ Compuware Corp., along with General Motors’ new headquarters at the Renaissance Center, had already made when locating their operations downtown, asking, “Would we have come down if Mike and Peter had not made the leap before us? What about all of the companies that have followed since we first began our relocation and investment strategy in 2010?”
Since that time, Bedrock Detroit, the real estate division Gilbert founded in 2011, has invested more than $5.6 billion in nearly 100 Detroit properties, most of which are located in the central business district.
The Madison Theatre building, an early acquisition, became home to Detroit Venture Partners and startup companies such as Detroit Labs. Gilbert’s casino-gaming company, Jack Entertainment, acquired the Greektown Casino and Hotel out of bankruptcy in 2012 and sold it in 2018 for $1 billion. StockX, the world’s first “stock market of things,” was his 2016 initiative for an online secondary market for consumer items.
The latest achievement is completing a seven-year, nearly $400-million restoration of the historic Book Tower and neighboring Book Building along Washington Boulevard.
Quicken Loans announced in 2018 that its Rocket Mortgage had become the nation’s largest mortgage lender, with 5.4 percent of the fragmented market. Rocket Mortgage replaced Quicken Loans as the company name in 2021. Rocket now employs 13,000 people in Detroit and appears headed for further growth.
Gilbert has spoken of attaining a 10 percent market share in the mortgage sector, and even suggests that 20 percent is possible. Meanwhile, his family of companies comprises dozens of businesses, many of which occupy buildings he acquired and renovated, including the First National Building, the David Stott Building, the former Detroit News and Detroit Free Press structures, and the Buhl Building.
For Gilbert, the pièce de résistance is the still-unnamed 1.5-million-square-foot complex under construction at the Hudson’s site, where demolition occurred in 1998. Bedrock acquired the site in 2016 and broke ground late the next year on a 685-foot tower — to be the second-tallest in Michigan — and a companion midrise building.
The pinnacled tower will offer mixed-use space including a hotel in the middle floors, upper-floor residences, and public rooftop amenities. Completion is expected in 2024. The 11-story midrise building has 400,000 square feet of office and event space with an interior design by Pophouse, a Detroit studio.
The development stands at 1208 Woodward Ave. between Rocket Mortgage headquarters and the Shinola Hotel, in which Gilbert’s Rock Ventures was a major investor. The Hudson’s site project has already earned a 2023 Impact Award for commercial development from CoStar, the commercial real estate analytics group, which cited the symbolic importance for Detroit’s future. — Ronald Ahrens
Net Worth
Dan Gilbert: $18.0B
Source: Forbes
Bill Ford
The reconstitution of Ford Motor Co. is evident in many ways, but most auspicious in Detroit is the Michigan Central Mobility District, which has been under development in Corktown since 2018. The eyes of the world have fixed upon this daring project to renovate the former Michigan Central Station and other buildings on 30 surrounding acres to create a mobility innovation campus.
The company acquired the station, as well as other nearby buildings, in 2017 for some $90 million. It allocated $740 million for restoration, which is expected to wrap up early next year. A driver of the massive undertaking is the need to create an attractive workplace for software designers and other technologically savvy professionals — something along the lines of the Google and Apple campuses in Silicon Valley.
This April, Michigan Central, as it has become known, celebrated the completion of phase one when the rehabilitated Detroit Public School Book Depository building opened as a tech incubator. Originally known as the Roosevelt Warehouse, the Book Depository, designed by Albert Kahn, had been sitting idle for years.
Today, it provides space for the Newlab Mobility Studio. Launched in 2016 in Brooklyn, N.Y., Newlab’s mission is to find mobility solutions for broad societal benefit. Another tech venture is Cavnue, the developer of connected-vehicle technology, which is working on a team to develop the world’s first connected and automated vehicle corridor along I-94.
“This is exactly what I wanted to see happen here,” Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor Co., said when he addressed the grand-opening audience. Ford began to push the project after experiencing a series of steps that expanded his vision. “In 2009, I started a venture capital company (Fontinalis Partners) to invest in mobility. Most people didn’t even know what mobility meant back then, but it was clear to me our world was going to change,” he said.
Ford, 66, started his journey within the company in 1979 as a product analyst, and rose to executive chairman after two decades. He served as the auto manufacturer’s CEO from 2001 to 2006. Initiating a kind of mid-career revitalization in 2005, he joined the board of eBay for what would be a 10-year stint. He found that traveling to Silicon Valley each month gave him a big energy jolt on technology matters. Experiences there, such as driving the Tesla Roadster, the company’s first offering, made him realize “We’re an insular company in an insular industry,” as he explained in a 2022 interview with “Karl on Cars.”
While studying at Princeton University in the 1970s, Ford read environmentalist writers and thought beyond the established confines. Later, running the car company, he considered starting a foundation to benefit environmental causes. Then it hit him: “If I can actually change Ford, I’ll have a much bigger impact than anything I can do outside of Ford.”
Change has occurred in many aspects, even beyond manufacturing. Ford, whose family also owns the Detroit Lions, helped to conceive Ford Field as a beacon of sustainability while also bringing the team back to Detroit from Pontiac.
Completed in 2002 for $500 million, the stadium shines as an example of adaptive reuse by incorporating the former Hudson’s warehouse into the overall design. Through its philanthropic arm, the Ford Motor Company Fund, the manufacturer focuses on entrepreneurship, expanding access to essential services, and education for the future of work.
But the chief symbols are inevitably its cars and trucks, including electric vehicles like the popular Mustang Mach-E SUV and F-150 Lightning pickup. Adding manufacturing capacity is a must, as evidenced by a new highly efficient factory in Dearborn where the F-150 Lighting goes through final assembly.
“We’ve done a lot,” Ford said at the Book Depository ceremony. “Particularly in the early years, we (Fontinalis Partners) kind of invented the mobility space. But it occurred to me that almost none of it was happening in Detroit.” More than 30 companies have signed on at Michigan Central, leading Ford to say, “The best and the brightest are coming here to invent things to help us with the future that we need in this community, and I couldn’t be more excited.” — Ronald Ahrens
Net Worth
Bill Ford: $1.0B
Source: CelebrityNetWorth.com
Tony Soave
At the same time Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Co., acquired the Michigan Central Station in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood to convert it into a mobility innovation campus, a major, mixed-use development was already transforming the city’s oldest neighborhood.
Toney Soave, president and CEO of Soave Enterprises in Detroit, recently completed a $150-million residential and retail district called Elton Park that has, as its centerpiece, the former Checker Cab headquarters along Trumbull Street, just east of the former Tiger Stadium site.
The project, part of Soave Real Estate Group, includes six restored and newly constructed buildings that offer more than 150 apartments, 13,000 square feet of retail space, and Checker Alley, an activated landscaped area for residents and their guests. More apartments on the drawing board could lead to a total of around 420 units.
Built in 1927, Checker Cab, a three-story, 120,000-square-foot structure, was acquired by Soave in 1998. The headquarters of the ground transportation company was eventually moved to Lafayette Park on the city’s east side, which opened the way for Soave to undertake a conversion.
“As the business for Checker Cab evolved, we began … to formulate the plans for Elton Park,” Soave says. “The nice thing about Elton Park is that it’s very walkable. You can easily walk or ride a bike up or down Michigan Avenue and reach downtown, or go farther west into Corktown or Mexicantown.”
A Detroit native, the one-time high school football star has built up Soave Enterprises to include real estate developments in Michigan, Florida, and Virginia; metals recycling businesses; auto dealerships in Kansas City, Mo.; and Chicago-area Budweiser distributorships. In May, he broke ground on Kinsale Golf Club in Naples, Fla.
Soave says when he began planning for Elton Park, named for an urban square that was demolished to make way for the nearby Lodge Freeway, he had no idea Ford would acquire Michigan Central — which, when completed early next year, will represent close to $1 billion in investment.
What he did see was other new opportunities that were beginning to breathe life into Corktown.
Tiger Stadium had been torn down and replaced by a $20-million youth sports complex highlighted by a baseball diamond called the Willie Horton Field of Dreams, which offers 2,500 stadium seats, a banquet center, office space, and room for other activities. And surrounding the park, Larson Realty Group is nearing completion of The Corner, which offers 110 apartments and 26,000 square feet of ground floor retail space set in a four-story building that spans three sides of the site. — Michigan Avenue, Trumbull Street, and the Fisher Freeway service drive.
“I had acquired Checker Cab to provide transportation ser- vices with the casinos coming in, and Comerica Park and Ford Field were under construction,” Soave says. “During that period (in 1998), the theater district was coming back, especially with the reopening (in 1996) of the Detroit Opera House.
“With Elton Park, we were able to create a neighborhood within a neighborhood,” he adds. As Ford moves more workers into Corktown, it will add to the vibrancy in the area and provide more opportunities for developers to expand. — R.J. King
Tom Gores
From its white Ionic columns to its window shutters in gleaming black, nothing about the Georgian Revival building one block from city hall in Beverly Hills, Calif., suggests a relationship to 24-ounce cans of Miller High Life for $1.18 at a market in Flint — but there is an immediate connection.
Beverly Hills is home to Tom Gores’ Platinum Equity, which manages $36 billion in diversified assets. In Genesee Charter Township, near Flint, his working life started when he stocked produce and carried out bags at a family-owned market.
Rather than the ill-fitting clerk’s apron he wore circa 1980, he sported a business suit with a silk tie and a pocket square when posing for a photo there in 2015. The beer specials were in the background.
Gores, who turns 59 in July, has owned the Detroit Pistons and Palace Sports & Entertainment since 2011. Born Tewfiq Georgious in 1964, Tom Gores came to Michigan from Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel, at the age of 5. He and his family were sponsored by an uncle, Tom Jabroun.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in construction management from Michigan State University, he worked with his older brother, Alec, who in 1987 had founded the Gores Group to acquire and turn around troubled businesses. Tom headed to Los Angeles in 1989, and in 1995 he formed Platinum Equity, which grew rapidly.
In a cover story in DBusiness, Gores explained his business philosophy. “We want to get involved in situations where we can make a difference. … We’re very operationally focused. There hasn’t been a change in focus or philosophy; just different industries. Steel companies, auto parts distributors — really, we look at the end user in every company that we buy. Is that an end user that will be around forever?”
Platinum is “industry agnostic.” It has made investments in finance, health care, aviation, natural resources, technology, and media. Gores purchased The San Diego Union-Tribune for $30 million (estimated) in 2009 and sold it 10 years later for $110 million.
He attributed the “extraordinary value” to another portfolio company, PNA Group Holding Corp., and “strong leadership, hard work, and operational excellence” in 2008, when Platinum sold the unit to Reliance Steel & Aluminum Co. for $1.1 billion. He had paid $365 million in May of 2006 and made improvements.
Through it all, though, Gores never lost sight of Detroit. Years ago, his Uncle Tom told a reporter, “I talked to him on the phone yesterday, and he said he’s going to put Michigan on the map.”
Gores bought the Pistons from the late Bill Davidson in 2011 for $325 million, arranging a 51/49 partnership with Platinum. Four years later, he acquired the minority stake. In 2016, he and Ilitch Holdings Inc., the parent company of Marian and the late Mike Ilitch, reached a deal to bring the Pistons downtown — for the first time in 38 years — to play at Little Caesars Arena. (The Palace of Auburn Hills, their previous home, was demolished in 2020.)
In a joint venture between Olympia Entertainment (Ilitch Holdings) and Palace Sports & Entertainment, the two entities came together to form 313 Presents, which produces concerts and other shows at Little Caesars, the Fox Theatre, Comerica Park, Pine Knob Music Theatre, Meadow Brook Amphitheater, and the Michigan Lottery Amphitheater at Freedom Hill.
More recently, in 2019, the Pistons completed their move back to Detroit by opening the Henry Ford Detroit Pistons Performance Center, a $90-million training facility and corporate headquarters in the New Center neighborhood. The 185,000-square-foot building includes a sports medicine facility managed by Henry Ford Health as well as retail space and a public gym.
“This facility is a huge win — for the community, our franchise, our fans, and our future,” Gores said. In the autumn of 2019, the Detroit Pistons Foundation partnered with the City of Detroit and other foundations to launch Basketball for All, an initiative that’s renovating dozens of courts around Detroit as well as donating 50,000 basketballs to kids.
In addition, last February Gores, Henry Ford Health, and Michigan State University announced plans for a $1.8-billion campus near the Pistons practice facility that would include a new hospital, residential and commercial development, and a potential hotel. But Gores has more in store for Detroit and Michigan.
“I’m a big believer in core competency,” he said. “In Michigan, we know how to manufacture. We have an engineering talent that compares almost to no one. We have great universities and a very skilled workforce. We have to put that to work.
“A lot of folks talk to me about how much new stuff there is in Michigan, and I think that’s fine, but we have a core competency that, compared to the rest of the country, we should really leverage. I mean, there’s a tremendous engineering base, and great universities where you have great people coming out of there. There’s a workforce, both white collar and blue collar, that’s hard-working and has the right values. So I really think that’s where we should be leveraging ourselves in Michigan.” — Ronald Ahrens
Net Worth
Tom Gores: $6.1B
Source: Forbes
Stephen M. Ross
As a youngster living on Detroit’s west side, Stephen M. Ross loved to attend Tigers, Lions, and Red Wings games. He received tickets to the games courtesy of his uncle, Max M. Fisher, whose Aurora Gasoline Co. sponsor
ed sporting events until being acquired by Marathon Petroleum Corp. in 1959.
Before that watershed moment, though, Ross had to leave Detroit and Mumford High School behind when his immediate family moved to Miami Beach, Fla.
It was a long journey back, but Ross managed to come home, earning a business administration degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1962. He then embarked on a career in New York City, finding his way into the real estate business and generating a fortune that ranks him 147th on the Forbes list of billionaires, at $11.6 billion.
Today, at 83, he owns the Miami Dolphins and is a partner in the construction of an 80-story office tower in Miami. He’s maintained a formidable presence in Ann Arbor for more than 20 years, and now he’s becoming more involved in his old hometown, as well.
Starting with a gift of $5 million for the Stephen M. Ross Academic Center on the athletic campus in 2003, Ross has donated at least $478 million to the University of Michigan for scholarships, improvements to sports facilities, and remaking the business school — where instead of the clunky-sounding Stephen M. Ross School of Business, the new brand is called simply Michigan Ross.
Thanks to $100 million from Ross, the University of Michigan Center for Innovation is soon to break ground in Detroit on four acres that are currently in use for parking along Cass Avenue, two blocks west of the Fox Theatre. UMCI will receive another $100 million from the State of Michigan; an additional $50 million is yet to be raised. Olympia Development, part of Ilitch Holdings Inc. and a partner in the project, donated the four-acre property, representing a new alignment between Ross’ Related Cos. and the Ilitch family.
First announced in 2018, the project, then called the Detroit Center for Innovation, was to be executed in partnership with Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock development arm on the 14-acre former jail site on Gratiot Avenue near I-375, but in 2021 Ross issued a statement blaming the pandemic and invoking the need for the Center “to have a greater catalytic economic and social impact on the people of Detroit, which was not possible at its current site.”
The new alliance with Olympia Development will move ahead with the sleek, ultramodern 200,000-square-foot research and education center. Architect Kohn Petersen Fox, of New York City, produced a design with bold external gridwork that makes a dramatic statement. It will be one of three buildings on the mini-campus.
The existing Loyal Order of the Moose Lodge on the site will get a makeover and become a technology incubator, while a third building — new construction — will offer 300 units of housing along Cass Avenue. All this will give the downtown area something it lacked: a college campus.
“I’m more committed than ever to deliver my vision of an innovation hub in my hometown,” Ross says, “and I reaffirm my commitment to the people of Detroit and the University of Michigan to create inclusive growth that propels job creation, affordable housing development, and historic preservation for all Detroiters.”
Implicit in the new campus are potential synergies with U-M’s Horace H. Rackham Educational Memorial building in Detroit’s Midtown. In 2021, the university announced a $40 million pledge for its renovation.
Early this year, plans began moving forward for a $1.5 billion joint venture between Olympia Development and Related Cos. for a transformational development in the heart of The District Detroit, the 50-block area that includes Little Caesars Arena, Comerica Park, Ford Field, theaters, office buildings, and more.
It is anticipated that the project will yield 695 mixed-income residential units and 1.2 million square feet of office space, as well as retail locations and hotel rooms. Six new buildings will be built and four existing ones will be renovated. In May, the Detroit City Council authorized a 10-year tax abatement, saving the developers $51.8 million on four of the buildings. That’s a chunk of the $798 million they’ve sought in total from the state and city.
The flood of supporting architectural renderings show gleaming towers and sensitive makeovers. Of the newly constructed buildings, there will be office space at 2200 and 2300 Woodward Ave., a Little Caesars Arena hotel, a hotel in the former Fox Office Building, and a residential tower. The promise is 6,000 jobs, more than $500 million in wages annually, and up to $750 million in tax revenue for the city over the next 35 years. With other concurrent developments, Ross’ efforts ensure the renewal of Detroit is within grasp. — Ronald Ahrens
Net Worth
Stephen Ross: $11.6B
Source: Forbes
