Just how empty is GM's Renaissance Center?

It’s no secret that the Renaissance Center has become a bit of a ghost town in downtown Detroit, with just a fraction of the workers it had prior to the pandemic. But we’ve not known with any level of specificity just how empty it is, until now.

Placer.ai data compiled for Automotive News affiliate Crain’s Detroit Business by staff at the Downtown Detroit Partnership paints a grim picture, with the number of average daily workers in the towers standing at just 20 percent of pre-pandemic levels in 2019. For comparison, the broader downtown has been close to triple that number in recent months. 

Similarly dismal, the total number of visitors and workers in 2023 was just 38.5 percent of 2019 levels, per the Placer.ai data. 

An email was sent to a spokesperson for General Motors , which owns the primary portion of the complex, seeking comment or an interview on Oct. 1. 

The Placer.ai figures include all six office towers, plus the 73-story Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center — the state’s tallest building at 727 feet — and its 1,300 or so hotel rooms.

One caveat in the findings highlighted by Joshua Long, Downtown Detroit Partnership director of data programs: The figures do not differentiate between GM workers — those who remain, that is — in the primary four towers surrounding the central hotel tower and the adjacent Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan workers in one of the two 21-story buildings that were developed as part of the second phase of construction in the 1980s.

The data shows not just the difficult realities of the office market writ large as it attempts to recover from the lingering effects of the pandemic (though there have been some heartening statistics), it puts into focus the challenges that GM, Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock LLC, consultants and public officials face as they work to map out a game plan for the future of the Renaissance Center once the automaker moves out next year.

Peter McGrath, managing director in the Detroit office of brokerage house Savills, said the Renaissance Center data isn’t reflective of the broader state of the downtown area. But it does show the headwinds the state’s most prominent office complex faces — and has faced for years.

“As downtown perked up, it created a more competitive environment that the Renaissance Center really just couldn’t match,” McGrath said. “The signals had been obvious for everyone in the market that GM has wanted to pull up stakes for quite some time.”  

In short, while the pandemic dealt a crippling blow, the complex was already showing signs of stress even before the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Michigan were announced in March 2020. Subsequently, office workers across the state were sent home as a way to combat its spread.

In 2018, the average number of daily workers at the Renaissance Center was 9,543; that figure dropped 19.2 percent to 7,713 workers in 2019, per the Placer.ai data. In that same period, annual visitors and workers also dropped about 11.1 percent, from about 4.79 million to 4.26 million.

Now, broader downtown Detroit is faring much better. 

In August, the number of average daily downtown workers was 55 percent of what it was in July 2019, compared with just 20 percent or so for the Renaissance Center, according to Downtown Detroit Partnership data. That figure stood at 59 percent in July — the highest since the pandemic started. 

Downtown Detroit has evolved in the decades since the Renaissance Center was built, with Jefferson Avenue a major barrier to it.

What was seen as a selling point to tenants in the 1970s, 1980s and beyond — separation from the central business district, but still part of it — is now viewed as a major hindrance to the property, as the business hub's center of gravity has shifted to Campus Martius Park in the last 15 to 20 years. 

GM has also been moving many of its people from the Renaissance Center to its Warren Tech Center. 

Now that GM is poised to move, sources say demolition of at least a portion of the complex is under consideration, though a final decision has not been made.