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Old Hudson’s building is all that says 1970s shopping as redevelopment rises at Northland

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Old Hudson’s building is all that says 1970s shopping as redevelopment rises at Northland

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An ambitious plan for redeveloping the old Northland mall property in Southfield is starting to become a reality.

An initial batch of two newly constructed, six-story and 100-unit apartment and retail buildings is nearing completion, and the second batch — a pair of seven-story buildings with more apartments and retail — could break ground later this year or early next year.

The project’s demolition crews have finished taking down the 1970s expansion of the old shopping mall, leaving Northland’s original 1954 footprint and massive four-story Hudson’s department store building, which last operated as a Macy’s.

The developer, Contour Companies of Bloomfield Hills, is now looking to fill the upper floors of the old Hudson’s with a 150-room boutique hotel. For the department store’s lower floors, a market and food hall is envisioned.

And the 100-acre site is already home to Michigan’s first Costco Business Center, which opened in January.

Known as Northland City Center, the $400 million-plus redevelopment is ultimately expected to bring 14 new buildings and some 1,500 units of new housing, along with multiple new commercial and retail businesses. It is one of three projects for reusing old metro Detroit shopping mall sites that are either underway, planned or recently completed.

The other two are Eastland Center mall in Harper Woods and the newly shuttered Lakeside Mall in Sterling Heights.

Although the Northland project is taking a bit longer to get going than originally planned, it remains on course.

“This is the first new construction in this area in decades,” Contour Companies President David Dedvukaj said last week during a tour of the new buildings.

Southfield Mayor Ken Siver said he is, overall, pleased with the project, especially considering the challenges facing any new development these days, such as inflation, higher interest rates and local skilled-trades shortages.

More: How the redevelopment playbook changed for dead malls in metro Detroit

“It has slowed … but we are very confident it’s all going to happen,” Siver said Wednesday. “It was never going to be built in a couple years.”

Dedvukaj declined to comment on the project’s current timeline for full completion. But he said they now have multiple leasing commitments in hand and are in talks with a potential operator for the boutique hotel in the Hudson’s.

As for the initial two apartment/retail buildings, located along Greenfield Road, the first could be finished by year’s end and the second by next spring, he said.

“The demand for housing is there, so that’s the great part of it,” Dedvukaj said. “There’s a huge need for housing and we’re going to work as hard as we can to fulfill that.”

Each apartment building will contain about 100 market-rate units, with asking rents at about $2.25 to $2.30 per square foot, he said.

There also are plans for two restaurants in the buildings: City Center Café La Marsa, serving Mediterranean-style dishes, and Nora’s Famous Italian Kitchen.

The next pair of buildings could break ground either late this year or early next, Dedvukaj said, and would each bring another 100 housing units, plus ground-floor retail space that is set up for drive-throughs.

“Every year, we’re going to try and break ground on a pair of buildings,” he added.

An ambitious project

The Northland City Center project got underway in fall 2021, several months after Contour bought the shuttered shopping mall property from the city of Southfield for just over $11 million. Northland Center mall closed in 2015 and the city soon began to acquire parcels of the site to control its future.

Contour’s plan was approved for a $61.5 million Brownfield state-level tax capture and a $20.1 million local Brownfield loan.

As part of the redevelopment, the old Northland J.C. Penney building was demolished, as was the Firestone building that connected to the mall via an underground tunnel.

Dedvukaj said they ultimately intend to refurbish the empty Northland water tower for decorative purposes. The old power station next to the water tower is slated to become the development’s leasing office, he said, although it could eventually be turned into a brew pub.

The tunnels beneath the old mall are being preserved for possible future parking space, he said. Contour is in talks with “sports entertainment users” to possibly go into some of the original retail space. And there are plans to build a new Southfield police substation on the site.

Mayor Siver said there were discussions about amending the city’s official redevelopment plan for the site to accommodate “a major retailer” that was once looking to go in, but that retailer, which he declined to name, ultimately backed out because it was slowing down its expansion.

There also were talks with a developer who wanted to build a baseball stadium on the site for use by local school and college teams, Siver said, but those discussions stopped because the stadium developer wanted the city to issue bonds to finance the stadium.

“There are great ideas, but how do you pay for them,” Siver said. “And we weren’t going to bond on somebody’s dream — we weren’t going to take that kind of debt on.”

Overall, Siver said he believes Southfield made the right choice for the Northland site by going with a developer — Contour Companies — that was interested in building housing and retail.

Some in real estate circles had urged the city to instead go with big industrial and commercial warehouses on the site, perhaps similar to those recently built at the former Eastland Center mall site in Harper Woods.

“I can’t tell you the number of times I had real estate people say to me, ‘You’re going to regret turning this down. This is where the market is — you need to do this,’ ” Siver recalled.  “For us, it was always about growing our population and growing our tax base. And big boxes do not bring the type of tax dollars which we’re envisioning at Northland.”

Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on X @jcreindl.

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