The Renaissance Center, GM’s downtown Detroit headquarters with its distinctive outline of towers forming a familiar part of the “Motor City” skyline, continues to be nearly deserted compared to its pre-COVID hustle and bustle, as newly available, objectively collected statistics on the complex’s daily and yearly foot traffic confirms.
According to Crain’s Detroit Business, statistics from Placer.ai show just how much the Renaissance Center is only a shadow of its former self – though the decline actually started before the pandemic.
Traffic and occupancy at the location faltered somewhat in 2019, before COVID was even on the horizon. The number of daily workers at the Renaissance Center shrank by almost a fifth between 2018 and 2019, declining from 9,543 to 7,713 on average. With visitors figured in, the daily traffic shrank by a little more than 11 percent in the same period.
The number of workers at the Renaissance Center fell off a cliff with the advent of COVID, bottoming out at just 937 in 2021, a tenth of 2018 figures. Numbers have rebounded somewhat, but the daily average is just 1,539 workers on-site for the first nine months of 2024.
The recovery of downtown Detroit in general has actually hampered a return to previous levels of activity at the Center. Brokerage director Peter McGrath observes that “as downtown perked up, it created a more competitive environment that the Renaissance Center really just couldn’t match,” adding it is common knowledge “that GM has wanted to pull up stakes for quite some time.”…