Plans have been unveiled to rehab long-vacant apartments near Boston Edison
A comprehensive rehabilitation plan was unveiled Monday night for a long-vacant apartment building south of Detroit’s Boston Edison neighborhood that will reopen next year as affordable housing.
Developers David Alled and Andrew Cullum of Detroit-based Century Partners plan to redevelop the four-story Clairwood Apartments, 100 Claremont St., which has sat empty since 2005, despite multiple ownership changes during that time.
They intend to renovate and reopen the building with 42 apartments, all reserved at below-market rents for individuals and families making between 50% and 80% of the area median income, which currently ranges between $33,150 and $53,050 per year for a single person or $47,350. $75,750 to $75,750 for a family of four.
To achieve those reasonable rents, the developers are seeking to collect $472,750 in Brownfield taxes over 19 years, and they also plan to use the tax abatement in the adjacent enterprise zone.
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Alade made a presentation of their plans Monday during a public hearing for the Detroit Brownfield Redevelopment Authority. The meeting was held across from the Clairwood Apartments in the meeting room of the new Ruth Ellis Center apartments for LGBTQ youth.
The Brownfield proposal is still subject to several local and statewide approvals, including that of the Detroit City Council.
If all these approvals are obtained, they could begin renovations in November and possibly be ready to welcome the first new residents in late 2024, Alade said.
The majority of the building’s 42 units will be one-bedroom apartments, although there will be some studios, two-bedrooms and three three-bedroom apartments.
Alade said he lives nearby and had passed the empty building countless times before he and Colom acquired it last year.
Land records show they bought the building from an out-of-state investor for $960,000 in May 2022. That investor, in turn, bought it from an LLC for $528,000 in April 2019, records show. The LLC, for its part, acquired another LLC for $250,000 in November 2017.
Even before that, the building was auctioned off on eBay, selling for just $35,000 in early 2011, according to land records and comments on an online forum.
“If you look at the series of titles over the last 20 years, it seems like a lot of people brought them in I think with the intention of revamping them, and I think a lot of people found them that way,” Alade said. A very big project.”
“For us, it’s a little different. This is our backyard. This is kind of personal to us. This is a long-term investment, not a quick fix,” he added.
Alade and Colom’s Century Partners have rehabilitated more than 200 local housing units since 2014. Half of those units were single-family homes as well as duplexes and fourplexes, Alade said, while the others were 10-unit multifamily buildings or more.
Century Partners was at one time part of home rehab efforts in Detroit’s Fitzgerald neighborhood, though Alade said Monday they are no longer involved.
The Clairwood Apartments will be the partners’ largest rehab of a single building in the city to date.
“We hope to do more of that throughout Detroit,” he said.
Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on X @jcreindl.
