GM to plan move from RenCen to Dan Gilbert’s Hudson’s tower

[Atticus]

I am nowhere near as excited about this than most of you. What does this mean?

1) I assume this means them moving into the block [[not the tower). That block has less than 1 million square feet of office space. Not exactly a signature building for a major HQ like GM. The RenCen was a powerful statement for GM to have as their signature HQ... the block... not so much.

2) does this mean that they can move more workers out to Warren, and still fill the Hudson's Block. That would be a negative as far as jobs in Detroit.

3) What about the RenCen, the 800 lb. gorilla? GM paid $78 million for it and the spent another $500 million in renovating it. Who is going to own it? What will it become?

4) the new GM HQ... no longer dominating the skyline... but now hidden among the low rise downtown buildings. A lack of prestige regardless of where it is located.

5) This is about as exciting as Comerica moving out of the former Comerica Tower [[now Ally Tower) over to their new Detroit HQ... 411 West Lafayette...

My take is more this….
GM is a car company. The best people for designing, engineering, and marketing cars are generally the people who drive cars, and live and practice the auto centric, aka suburban, lifestyle. For the health of GM, let’s stop pretending that the best people for designing vehicles are urbanists who take transit and live downtown without vehicles. For the health of the region and GM, it is probably best that many of those jobs remain in the suburbs, because frankly that is where the best people for doing those jobs want to live, generally speaking. I know that will be an unpopular take on DetroitYes, but it’s probably true.

Now obviously a company as big as GM is still going to have office workers at the executive, accounting, legal, etc roles that still may make sense at a downtown office. But there aren’t that many jobs in those particular roles at GM to fill up the RenCen space, and it probably makes sense to downsize office square footage. My guess is the Hudson block building is right sizing for the percentage of GM workforce that actually makes sense to work downtown, with the rest better relegated to working in suburban Warren.