Well, there go our hopes for Detroit getting a Target.
Target Corp. told Crain’s Detroit Business that it has abandoned its plan for a location in Midtown on the corner of Woodward and Mack Avenue.
A spokesperson for the retail giant told Crain’s in a statement Tuesday that the company is “no longer pursuing a store in this location” due to “ongoing delays and complications.”
The Target, announced in 2021, was supposed to go inside a new development that includes a planned 300 residential units. The residential and Target portion of the nearly seven-acre project is being helmed by City Club Apartments.
Apparently, the people over at City Club Apartments are still somehow holding out hope for the Target.
“We have a legally binding lease,” City Club Apartments CEO Jonathan Holtzman told Crain’s in a statement relayed through a representative. “We don’t have a letter from Target expressing their intent to cancel or modify the lease. We continue to move forward with our plans for this exciting mixed-use apartment and penthouse development.”
We should have known better than to get our hopes up that Detroit would get a large retail store. Especially since one of the banks in financing talks with City Club Apartments has already backed out from funding the project.
It’s been two decades since Detroit had a Target in the city. That store, in the east-side Bel-Aire shopping center, closed in 2003.
The planned Midtown Target wasn’t even a full-scale store — it was only a “small format” location at 32,000 square feet. Meijer opened a similar “small-format” location in Detroit dubbed Rivertown Market, on East Jefferson in 2021.
In a city as large as Detroit, what exactly is the reason that we can’t have full-sized retail stores? We are all for shopping locally, but where do you go when you need to buy basic goods? Instead of big box retail shops and grocery stores, like most major cities have, Detroiters are often left to shop at chaotic dollar stores that look like a tornado has blown through them (we’re looking at you Family Dollar) or travel to the suburbs.
An investigation by Bridge Detroit found Dollar Tree, which owns Family Dollar, has earned over 2,400 blight tickets since 2020, amassing over $740,000 in unpaid fines. We’re talking unkempt grass, trash-filled parking lots, and barren shelves with products sitting in boxes on the floor.
These dollar stores add more blight to neighborhoods, taking up space that could be occupied by a more useful option for Detroiters.
Detroit has an estimated 24 square miles of vacant land in a 139-square-mile city and, according to the Detroit Free Press, that only includes “structure-free parcels” and doesn’t account for lots with abandoned buildings. So it is ludicrous to suggest there isn’t space in the city for retail stores. (Meijer also has two larger stores on the north side of the city.) Maybe there isn’t enough space in downtown Detroit, but we cannot keep ignoring neighborhood residents as if the downtown and midtown areas are the only ones that exist.
I moved to Dearborn Heights last year and there are two Targets, two Krogers, and a Meijer all within a few miles. Granted, some of these are in neighboring suburbs, most of which are smaller than Detroit. But if these smaller suburbs can have a range of retail shops what’s the issue in Detroit? Don’t we deserve nice things too?
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