Detroit City Council approves $60M tax break for Dan Gilbert on Hudson’s project
July 27, 2022Miriam Marini
July 26, 2022
The Detroit City Council approved a $60 million tax abatement Tuesday for Dan Gilbert’s Hudson’s site project, despite some opposition from residents and community leaders.
The vote, which had been postponed three times, provides Gilbert’s real estate firm, Bedrock, a 10-year abatement that the firm says is key to financing the skyscraper’s completion.
Bedrock claims that the project’s costs have soared to $1.4 billion — up from $909 million when the development broke ground in 2017 — and that the abatement is crucial to securing bank loans.
The green light came after Bedrock representatives offered various concessions and amendments to the project’s community benefits package, such as raising the amount of affordable housing that it will build in Detroit.
City Council President Mary Sheffield said she supported the abatement because of the new, additional community benefits.
“In a perfect world, we would not need to offer tax abatements to developers to attract projects to the city of Detroit,” she said. “Unfortunately … Detroit has one of the highest tax rates in the nation amongst other major cities, and putting us at a competitive disadvantage, so tax abatements are a symptom of a much larger problem.”
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