Detroit Lions Practice Facility Moving Downtown?

[royce]

Considering all options, if the Lions want a practice facility in Detroit and near downtown/midtown, there's a huge plot of land that the city owns that they probably could get for dirt cheap and that's the Uniroyal site. That should meet their needs. The only spot in midtown that would fit their needs is the Brewster- Douglass Projects site. But like someone said, and I agree, that area should be used for high-density residential.

[Henry Whalley]

...a huge plot of land that the city owns that they probably could get for dirt cheap and that's the Uniroyal site.

Just guessing that site is really polluted. But how about land in the area where White Boy Rick grew up?

[mikeg19]

Considering all options, if the Lions want a practice facility in Detroit and near downtown/midtown, there's a huge plot of land that the city owns that they probably could get for dirt cheap and that's the Uniroyal site.

I might be in the minority but I'd be just as pissed if they built it on the Uniroyal site. That is prime riverfront real estate that I would hope a large high density residential development can be placed.

[royce]

I might be in the minority but I'd be just as pissed if they built it on the Uniroyal site. That is prime riverfront real estate that I would hope a large high density residential development can be placed.

I totally agree. I offered the Uniroyal site as an alternative to putting any kind of practice field downtown or in midtown. In Detroit development, it has often been an "all or nothing at all" mentality. Case in point, I drove passed the GM-Poletown plant and saw so much wasted space. Probably a third of the homes and businesses that the city tore down, didn't need to be torn down. Actually, a Lion's practice facility might work well on some of that Poletown plant land. Land along the Mt. Elliot-Conant side is underutilized and an eyesore. Putting some kind of development along that stretch of the property could only enhance it. There's also good access to I-94 and I-75 from that location. Hey a "win-win."

[Henry Whalley]

Land along the Mt. Elliot-Conant side is underutilized and an eyesore.

Casinos could have gone there in lieu of sacrificing Greektown or Rivertown.

[Airforceguy]

Contenders emerge for new Detroit Lions practice facility

The team has not definitively said whether it will move out of its training center in Allen Park, but there are already at least two concepts for a new facility floating around — one in the team’s namesake city, another about 30-ish miles to the southwest.
Lions President Rod Wood recently told reporters that the team is years away from moving from its Allen Park facility — if it ultimately decides to — and it is looking at locations in Detroit as well as around Ann Arbor. The two that are known are entirely conceptual at this point. One is on the old Herman Kiefer hospital site at the John C. Lodge Freeway and Clairmount in Detroit across about 40 acres, while the other is in Canton Township on a hodgepodge of privately-owned parcels with multiple owners at I-275 and Ford Road.


A Detroit architect, Jerry Attia, pieced together a detailed site plan for the Herman Kiefer site owned by New York City developer Ron Castellano, who said last month he hasn’t had any conversations with the Ford family-owned team about the property. Attia, a former Rossetti Associates Inc. and AECOM architect who co-founded Detroit-based architecture firm Framework E LLC with fellow cofounder and Rossetti/AECOM veteran Pierre Roberson last summer, said he has not been commissioned for his work.

Canton Township is also attempting to lure the Lions. Its pitch, put together in a three-page PDF the township provided to Crain’s, is for a wooded site with north of what could be more than 100 acres across multiple parcels of varying sizes immediately east of the freeway, south of Ford Road. Officials called this site a “hypothetical” and a way of showing the team that, if it is to ultimately relocate its practice and training facilities, “there are potential locations.”

For its part, the Lions said last week that there is no proposal in front of it for the Herman Kiefer site, and the team declined comment Wednesday in a follow-up inquiry on the Canton Township property. A spokesperson for Mayor Mike Duggan said: “There are no conversations going on at all between the Lions and the city on any potential practice site in the city of Detroit.”“At no point have the Lions expressed any interest to the city in the Herman Kiefer site,” John Roach, Duggan’s director of media relations, said last week.
The top administrator in its current base, Allen Park, has not responded to messages from Crain’s.
But the team has talked publicly in recent weeks about a potential relocation of those facilities, which sit on about 22 acres.

"We’re still evaluating it," Wood told reporters late last month, according to the Detroit Free Press. "I know there’s a lot of rumors out there and every time I talk about it, it leads to more people reaching out to me with ideas on where we should be. I would say it’s in the early stage of evaluating it. We’re focused on potentially that. Obviously, downtown with the 375 project and the impact that’s going to have on the stadium and traffic flow, so we have a real estate consultant who’s working on all those things, but very, very early stages of any announcement on the practice facility."

https://www.crainsdetroit.com/real-e...ctice-facility