The famed Renaissance Center in Detroit has been the hive where GM houses its most important worker bees since it acquired the building in 1996, but lately the building is feeling more like an empty nest. The complex comprises six giant office towers, a 73-story Marriott hotel, and a pair of shorter 21-story buildings occupied by an insurance company, but these days it’s host to just a fraction of its pre-pandemic traffic heights.
According to research from Crain’s Detroit Business, average daily workers in the RenCen across 2024 so far make up just 20 percent of what was seen in 2019. The data also shows that foot traffic in total, including visitors, was just 38.5 percent across all of 2023 compared to 2019. The data does not differentiate between General Motors workers and the Blue Cross Blue Shield workers in the adjacent towers. It seems that most GM workers never returned to the office, making the anchor point of Detroit’s skyline largely a ghost town. Before COVID-19 the building played host to nearly five million visitors per year, but last year that dipped to just 1.6 million.
GM is moving its corporate headquarters across town to a building with a much smaller footprint, for obvious reasons. The automaker has confirmed that it does not currently have any plans to sell the building or let it sit abandoned when it leaves next year. GM hired consulting firm Bedrock LLC to figure out a game plan to fill the giant building in a post-General world.
I, for one, hope that at least one of the towers is converted into a multi-story go-kart racing track. That would be an incredibly cool, if not ultimately profitable, use for the space. It’s the motor city, why not give visitors a memorable place to connect with motors?