Development gets reported at the announcement. Announcements are cheap: a render, a number, a quote about transforming a neighborhood. Some of them become buildings and some quietly do not, and almost nobody goes back to check which.
The building permit register is the boring version of the same story, and it has one advantage over every press release ever issued. A permit is a filing. Someone paid for it, an address is attached, and the city either issued it or did not.
Here is what Detroit has issued this year, largest first.
$874 million, and it is a hospital
2850 W Grand Boulevard. The filing describes a phase-three permit for interior build-out to establish a 19-story hospital, referencing an earlier phase-one permit from 2024. It dwarfs everything else on the list by an order of magnitude.
Worth understanding what that number is and is not: it is the estimated contractor cost on a phase of a project already under way, not a ribbon-cutting and not a new announcement. The interesting thing is the scale, and that it is happening on Grand Boulevard rather than downtown.
Two schools
18875 Ryan Road, $45.7m — a phase-two permit for a new 108,000 square foot, single-story high school, plus athletic fields. The filing names it as Pershing High.
900 Dickerson Street, $29m — a new two-story, 71,445 square foot pre-K through eight school.
Two school buildings inside eight months, neither downtown, both in the top five by value. That is not the story the skyline tells.
The one downtown
25 Cadillac Square, $42.5m. A new 70,000 square foot, three-story, 1,600-seat immersive theater with on-site consumption. Cadillac Square is about as central as Detroit gets, and a 1,600-seat venue is a serious piece of programming capacity.
And the unglamorous ones
9040 W Jefferson, $49.8m — a new pump building. 1326 St Antoine, $27.6m — core and shell for a two-story, 89,050 square foot office building, with a separate tenant permit still required.
The caveat that matters
A permit is permission, not a promise. Some of these will slip and some will not finish. The register tells you what has been signed off, which is a much smaller claim than what will exist — but it is a claim you can check, and it updates whether or not anybody issues a statement.
The table on our [Downtown page](downtown.html) refreshes from the city's register daily.