Detroit City Council Severs Ties with Ex-Uniroyal Redevelopment Plan

Detroit officials are moving forward with plans to sever the city from a failed 20-year plan to redevelop the former Uniroyal site on the riverfront west of the MacArthur Bridge leading to Belle Isle.

On Tuesday, March 11, the Detroit City Council unanimously approved the termination of a brownfield redevelopment plan for the 44-acre parcel of land between East Jefferson Avenue and the Detroit River. If it had gone forward, the plan would have created a $400 million mixed-use development that would have been eligible for tax breaks. The project, however, never got off the ground in more than two decades.

The original plan for the site began in 2004. Detroit's former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, touted an initiative involving former NFL running back Jerome Bettis that would have built a massive residential and retail development on the property. Bettis and his group of investors changed their minds about the project several times over the years, but the goal was always to develop the former industrial site into an upscale residential area. According to city documents obtained by The Detroit News, the latest plans called for a mixed-use development with a targeted completion date of 2042.

The decades-long development agreement between the Bettis group and the city ended in October 2024, meaning the Bettis group lost its exclusive rights to develop the property. A representative for the Bettis group could not be reached for comment.

"The property was extremely environmentally challenging," said Cora Capler, a senior brownfield program manager at the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. "The plan is being abolished to clear the books, so to speak, administratively." Terminating the brownfield agreement from 2006 will "clear the way for a future project should one be proposed," she added.

The property itself has been part of Detroit for centuries. During the 1860s, a factory on the site made cast-iron stoves. Around the turn of the 20th century, a bicycle tire maker operated a factory there, and from 1917 to 1941, the former U.S. Rubber Co. manufactured automobile tires there. Uniroyal Tires took over and operated a 900,000-square-foot facility on the site until the early 1980s.