The exterior of City Club Apartments CBD Detroit.
City Club Apartments The exterior of City Club Apartments CBD Detroit.

City Club Apartments recently celebrated the opening of two new apartment projects in Detroit's city center: City Club Apartments CBD Detroit, its newest ground-up apartment community, and City Club Apartments Lafayette Park, a redevelopment of a 1970s mixed-use community. Together the communities will offer nearly 500 apartment units, both furnished and unfurnished with short- or long-term lease options, and a portion of the units in each community will be designated as affordable.

CBD Detroit

According to Jonathan Holtzman, a Detroit native and City Club Apartments’ founder and CEO, City Club Apartments CBD Detroit is the first conventionally financed, ground-up, mixed-use, high-rise apartment community to open in Detroit’s central business district in 30 years. Known as an “apartment hotel” community, CBD Detroit is made and managed with hospitality-style operation in mind.

The club room at CCA CBD Detroit.
City Club Apartments The club room at CCA CBD Detroit.

“My entire career, I’ve been an advocate that we should be like the hospitality business,” Holtzman says. “You go to a hotel for an experience. It makes you feel good, and you get treated extremely well.”

The community will offer 288 short- and long-term furnished and unfurnished units. The furnished units, managed by hotelier Barsala, will be available for stays as long as one night or as long as a few months. The unfurnished units, managed by City Club, are leasable for anywhere from six months to five years. Units include studios, convertibles, and one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments, penthouses, and townhouses, with additional half-bath, duplex, and den/home office options.

The building features the amenities package standard in all City Club buildings, including a lobby lounge library, an entertainment clubroom with a professional kitchen, an indoor theater, a 24/7 fitness center, and a work-from-home business center and conference room. The indoor/outdoor heated pool and hot tub opens onto the outdoor Terrace Club courtyard, which features an outdoor kitchen and bar, a zen garden, a pet park, and a drive-in sized outdoor theater.

Retail tenants include a pet store and a restaurant/bar with indoor and outdoor space. The community is Clean Rated, meets the Green Building Initiative’s Green Globes Certification, and is pursuing wellness certification.

Lafayette Park

CCA Lafayette Park, formerly known as Elmwood Park Plaza, was built in the early 1970s by Holtzman’s father and uncle, Toby and David Holtzman, as Holtzman & Silverman. It was one of the nation’s first mixed-use communities, according to Jonathan Holtzman, and included a branch of the Detroit Public Library, a Farmer Jack grocery store, and other retail space. The Detroit Public Library remains a tenant at CCA Lafayette Park.

“The largest amount of apartments ever built in America was in the '70s. It’s when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was very involved in helping in construction and mortgage lending, and a lot of subsidized housing,” Holtzman says. “So this was a high-rise designed for elderly subsidized people [and] was really unique; HUD had never done a mixed-use development like this. It won all kinds of awards for what it was. So here we are 50 years later, and everything is different. So we redeveloped it to the future, except the library. … We wanted the library to stay, because the education of young people is critical to America’s success.”

City Club’s redevelopment of the 50-year-old building focuses on creating “affordable luxury” in Detroit’s city center. Improvements at Lafayette Park include amenities and units renovated to match the City Club brand, as well as new landscaping, a new HVAC system, and high-efficiency exterior windows. The community will be NAHB Green Building certifiied and Clean Rated in pursuit of wellness certification. Amenities include a lobby lounge and library, an entertainment club room with a gourmet kitchen, an outdoor Terrace Club with a heated pool and grilling area, and a rooftop Sky Lounge on the 18th floor.

The pool deck at City Club Apartments Lafayette Park.
City Club Apartments The pool deck at City Club Apartments Lafayette Park.

Adding in Affordability

Out of the 202 newly redeveloped apartments and penthouses at Lafayette Park, 20% are designated affordable by the developer for new and existing community residents alike. According to Holtzman, the majority of these units were claimed by existing residents and will provide opportunities for other renters as the units turn over.

“A lot of cities, especially Detroit, they don’t want to lose their housing stock or long-time residents. So Mayor Mike Duggan and the City Council gave us the tax abatement, saying, 'You have to work with the existing residents.' And we did, and it wasn’t that hard to do,” he says.

Holtzman notes that many cities give similar tax abatement for affordable housing, and that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac offer lower mortgage interest rates for communities that achieve green certification and designate a portion of units as affordable.

“I’m an incredible advocate of taking 10% to 20% of every apartment project built and requiring affordable [units], whether it’s 80% of area median income or others. Then cities say if you do that, they’ll give you a tax abatement. And it’s easy to do,” Holtzman says. “By not doing affordable housing, [developers are] going to create this knee-jerk reaction that causes rent control. [This] would solve a huge problem of affordable housing in America. So for both of these properties, that’s exactly what we did. We’re solving affordable housing problems and creating great places to live, and they’re green buildings on top of it.”