Ford restores Detroit train station for $950 million campus

The 30-acre “Michigan Central” campus and station was initially announced in 2018 and is expected to open by 2022. However, the coronavirus pandemic and extensive work required to renovate the station delayed its reopening. Ford is celebrating the restoration of the century-old station on Thursday.

Following Thursday’s event, the ground floor of the station building will be open to the public until June 16, before the first commercial occupants begin moving in this fall.

The new campus comes at a precarious time for Ford investors, as the company continues to restructure its operations. It also comes as many companies are trying to downsize their offices and fill their current buildings with employees who have become accustomed to working from home during the pandemic.

Specifically in Detroit, a stark juxtaposition emerged: In April, Ford rival General Motors announced it would downsize its massive Renaissance Center headquarters along the city’s riverfront to two floors in a neighboring building under construction.

Still, Ford Chairman Bill Ford Jr. said he believes the investment in the historic station is a crucial part of the automaker’s future, particularly in terms of talent acquisition and retention. .

“We are in a war for talent, our industry and our business,” Ford, who led the project, told CNBC. “And you have to give talent two things: First you have to give them really interesting problems to solve, and then you have to give them a great place to work. With Michigan Central, we checked both of those boxes.”

Bill Ford decided to buy the dilapidated building after years of traveling to Silicon Valley for his venture capital firm Fontinalis and during his tenure as an eBay board member. He has long spoken out about the need for the traditional auto industry to compete with new technology companies, both in acquiring products and talent.

Ford said attracting top talent to Detroit is “getting better,” but noted that “it’s a big challenge” to convince workers from California or the East Coast to move to Detroit and work for Ford.

“If you can show them a place like Central Michigan, not only in its beauty, which in itself is incredible, but also in talking about the kinds of things that will happen there, then it becomes, I think, a really resource valuable to people. The business is moving forward,” he said.

The Michigan Central campus is located southwest of Detroit’s main business district, in a trendy neighborhood known as Corktown. It is approximately 10 miles from Ford’s global headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan.

Michigan Central’s campus spans a total of 1.2 square feet of commercial space, including millions of retail, restaurant and hospitality locations. Officials say it received $300 million in tax incentives for state, local and historic rehabilitation.

Ford officials have gone to great lengths to restore the station to its original glory after decades of vandalism and disrepair. The project involved 3D scanning the rooms, matching materials and referencing historical photos to recreate parts of the building.

This was especially true for the station’s first floor, where a great room features massive windows, an arcade and a grand lobby filled with marble and terrazzo floors, Mankato stone and other unique materials.

The architects and designers chose to leave some graffiti on the walls to represent the station’s dormant years after its closure in 1988.

To gauge Ford’s resolve, officials traced the facility’s original limestone to a quarry in Indiana only to discover that it had since closed. Michigan Central worked with the owners to reopen the quarry.

“It has been carefully and lovingly restored, as much as possible, to its original condition,” Michigan Central CEO Josh Sirefman said during a tour of the project. “Before you start activating it with a lot of stuff, it’s probably in its most pristine condition.”

Amid the nation’s commercial real estate challenges, about two-thirds of the tower has scheduled tenants or planned use cases, officials said. That includes an unnamed restaurant and hotel, pending rezoning approval.

The adjacent building, known as the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, already houses more than 600 employees from nearly 100 startups.

“This is really the beginning of the ecosystem that I want to create,” Bill Ford said. “There’s going to be a lot of experimentation there.”

Ford plans to house at least 2,500 employees in the building, primarily members of the company’s electric vehicle and connected services teams. About 1,000 of those employees are expected to move into the station tower by the end of this year, Ford said.

Other occupants of the building could include local universities, other businesses and a restaurant. However, authorities refused to release the full list of expected tenants. Google, a founding partner of the project, runs its “Code Next” program, which teaches students how to code, from the Book Depository building.

Ford said it expects the automaker’s future employees to be able to collaborate with other occupants of the station tower as well as startups occupying the Book Depository building.

Resurrecting the station and surrounding campus is the latest project that Bill Ford, great-grandson of company founder Henry Ford, has undertaken in the Motor City.

He was instrumental in moving the Ford family-owned Detroit Lions from suburban Pontiac to a new stadium, aptly named Ford Field, in downtown Detroit in 2002. He was also part of the team that brought the Super Bowl to the city in 2006.

And he redeveloped the company’s River Rouge assembly plant into a “green” production facility amid calls for it to close. It is now a tourist destination for the production of the Ford F-150 full-size pickup.

Ford, who served as CEO of the automaker from 2001 to 2006, described Michigan Central as a continuation of such projects. He called the effort a “legacy project” for himself as well as those who may have worked on it.

“I am very proud of these two [prior projects]but I think it’s going to kind of put an exclamation point on it because it’s going to be a wonderful place to work, but it’s also going to be a wonderful place for the public to come,” Ford said.