They call it the “fail jail,” writes Anna Clark, in Next City. In downtown Detroit, on Gratiot Avenue near Greektown, the half-built $300 million Wayne County jail sits abandoned, a victim of cost over-runs of nearly $100 million and an ensuing grand jury probe. It’s been untouched for more than a year. Accountability for the failure is still shaking out: Longtime county executive Robert Ficano lost his bid for re-election in an August primary, and on Monday, three county officials were indicted in an investigation of misconduct and willful neglect of public finances.
And Detroit has a gigantic problem on its hands: In this age of “placemaking” and downtown core revitalization, what to do about this monstrous unfinished structure at a major downtown entry point?
Dan Gilbert, the CEO of Quicken Loans who owns more than 60 major downtown buildings, proposed fashioning the site into a residential and commercial complex. Through his real estate arm, he offered $50 million to purchase the 15.5-acre site, but his proposals about what he would do with it are vague; he said he’ll spend $500 million to make rather ambitious conversions, like turning one jail complex into condominiums and another into a hotel. County commissioners have expressed that — in learning lessons from the jail mess — they are reluctant to leap without seeing where they are going. As I wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review (“Detroit’s Dan Gilbert and the ‘savior complex’”), that didn’t stop local media from mis-reporting last fall that Gilbert had “snapped up” the jail site, when in fact that has never happened; he’d only submitted sketches. Expectations are getting ahead of themselves here.
Maybe it’s true that Gilbert could do something great with the site. But Wayne County still needs a new jail. It explored converting a closed prison facility into a county jail and court facility, but that would cost up to $651 million — nearly twice as much as finishing the undone project, in a region that can scarcely afford it. Renovations on the current jail would reportedly cost between $20 million and $37 million — and only buy seven more years of use.
