DETROIT—This city has garnered a lot of attention recently due to the striking revival of its CBD. Companies that once made their headquarters in the suburbs, such as Quicken Loans, have headed downtown, and thousands of new residents have brought the urban core's residential vacancy rate down to almost zero. One aspect of this revival that may have escaped the attention of some, however, is the importance of tech firms.
“Quicken is really a tech company,” Dave MacDonald, managing director, JLL, tells GlobeSt.com. “The end product may be loans, but the way they do it is really high-tech.”
Dan Gilbert's firm and its family of companies have bought up more than 80 downtown properties, many of them 75 to 100 years old, the type of structure most favored by tech-savvy millennials. These once-underutilized structures now host about 13,000 workers every workday, and all this activity has attracted other smaller firms that want to get in on the action.
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
