Originally Posted by
Bham1982
There's no way that 40-50 apartment buildings have been built. Maybe 3 or 4 smaller buildings have been built within a few blocks of the DIA, and all on sites that had previous buildings, so not really a net gain.
There are so many lost buildings in Midtown it would be difficult to tally. But I'm old enough to remember clearly from about the early 90's, and the neighborhood was much more dense. There was a very large apartment building torn down for Wayne State parking, there was a church torn down for parking, Wayne State tore down a vibrant retail strip for a useless lawn and there are many other examples. There was the Vernor's site, a nearby apartment building along Woodward torn down, and a number of buildings along Cass torn down. And obviously the city was much denser/more vibrant in earlier decades.
Most of the Cultural Center building projects are just expansions of existing buildings [[CCS, African American Museum, Science Center) and replaced previous urban fabric. Garages are highly destructive to the urban fabric.