The din of construction greets visitors to Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s main thoroughfare. The brand-new Hudson’s Tower, now officially the city’s second-tallest building, reached its top height of 681 feet on April 11. New sidewalks are being poured. Orange cones and barrels are sprinkled across Campus Martius, the nexus of roads and businesses in the heart of downtown, as massive steel trusses are erected in that park and in Hart Plaza, a quarter mile down Woodward on the Detroit River. 

Springtime construction in Detroit isn’t a new thing, especially in recent years as the city’s revitalization kicks into higher gear. This year, though, the clamor of activity has a singular focus. As Detroit prepares to host the NFL Draft on April 25-27, the city is receiving national attention on a level it doesn’t normally see. But with an expected 300,000 visitors and some draft activities still in planning stages, many are wondering if Detroit is ready to handle this onslaught of attention.

The answer is unequivocally yes, says Visit Detroit CEO Claude Molinari. “We’ve spent the better part of 700 days preparing for this,” he says. With the influx of visitors in recent years—17 million in 2023 to the 10-county southeast Michigan area, according to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation—”the story of Detroit is improving by the second,” he says. 

17 million square feet and hundreds of new downtown businesses

That improvement story is especially evident downtown on Woodward, where the official draft selection party will take place. All around the draft stage at Campus Martius, city leaders are planning dozens of activations for the draft week. The new Hudson’s skyscraper is just one of hundreds of properties owned by Bedrock Real Estate, a company that holds more than 17 million square feet of Detroit property. 

In February, Bedrock began announcing a series of pop-ups to fill vacant storefronts downtown in time for the draft’s visitors. Of about a dozen new businesses, some will become permanent additions to the downtown retail scene, including a dentist, an arcade and roller rink, and a tailor. Others, like the Born in Detroit retail store, will fill the space for just a week. In all, Bedrock holds 120 dining and retail tenants within the draft footprint. 

$200 million in 3 days

The expected economic impact, says Visit Detroit’s Molinari, is between $150 and $200 million for the three-day event. That’s great news for Bedrock Executive Vice President and COO Ivy Greaner. Since 2011, Bedrock has poured more than $7.5 billion into the city, mostly downtown. Because Bedrock owns so much of the property within the draft footprint, says Greaner, “this has been unique” because “the NFL has basically had a one-stop shop rather than going to 15 or 100 landlords,” to arrange draft week activations.

“We encourage new business,” says Greaner, “and the best way to do that is give people an opportunity to try on spaces for two or three months to see if they can have a viable business and then potentially grow into a long-term tenant.” The pop-ups, permanent new stores and restaurant openings, and other activities, says Greaner, are the result of “preparation, all up and down the line for many, many, many months.” Bedrock worked with City of Detroit organizers, tenant groups, and the Downtown Detroit Partnership nonprofit to coordinate the April activities with the NFL.

“This is not the Detroit of the 2006 Super Bowl” 

Some internet wags, though, can’t help but compare the 2024 draft to another major NFL event hosted in the city: the 2006 Super Bowl XL. At that time, there were drastically fewer hotel rooms available in downtown Detroit, and complaints of a lack of restaurant and retail spaces for visitors. Greaner and other draft organizers are adamant that this is different. “This is not the Detroit of the Super Bowl time,” she says. In 2006, “Detroit was still largely vacant. Most of the work had not been done yet. This is a very different city [than] when that Super Bowl was here.”

Still, not everyone believes that the draft will prove a panacea for Detroit’s issues. The downtown area has the lowest residential population among its peers: just 0.15% of Detroit’s overall metro area population lives in the downtown area. This lack of live-in residents has proven an insurmountable challenge for some retailers. On April 17, sustainable fashion store Good Neighbor announced that after just under a year in downtown Detroit it was closing up shop. In an Instagram post, the retailer, which also has outlets in Chicago and Indianapolis, said “we’re out of options ($) and the downtown traffic hasn’t proven to be substantial (enough) to run an already difficult business.” 

One internet commentator dubbed the draft’s temporary retailers “Potemkin Popups,” drawing a comparison to the 2006 city efforts to erase signs of blight and abandonment. Downtown Detroit in particular, though, is considerably different now than it was in 2006—in no small part due to Bedrock’s heavy investment in the area. 

Jeanette Pierce is president at City Institute, an organization that works to tell Detroit’s story in a broader context than the one contained downtown. She established City Institute’s precursor, a tour company, just before the Super Bowl landed in Detroit in 2006. As in 2006, she says, many civic and private entities sprang into action to make improvements in time for the big day. “A lot of things didn’t happen just because of the Super Bowl,” she says, “but I think a lot of things happened sooner” than they might have because of the imminent event. “You always get the house cleaned before the party.” 

The city beyond downtown

For Pierce and some other Detroit residents, especially in the neighborhoods outside of the main draft activities, “the question is always for whom? Certainly our downtown has had billions of dollars in investment, and there’s almost no abandoned buildings downtown now,” she says. “But the neighborhoods [outside of downtown] are actually, some would say, worse off now than in 2006.” Much of that has to do with the financial crisis of 2008, which hit Detroit especially hard. In 2006, Detroit’s population was estimated at nearly a million; since then, and especially in the years surrounding the city’s bankruptcy declaration in 2013, the city’s neighborhoods have lost a steady stream of residents. Detroit’s current population of 620,000 is nearly a third lower now than it was in 2006. 

Pierce’s City Institute and others, including activists Sommer Woods and Michele Lewis Watts, are working to draw all of Detroit neighborhood residents into the fold and keep them engaged—and benefitting from—the boon brought by the draft. These groups are working directly with landholders, city leaders, and draft planners to activate spaces outside of the downtown core, with block parties and giant screens in key areas around the city. 

Business and economic impact after the NFL draft

And the direct impact on small business owners, whether they’re pop-up participants, food truck vendors, or event suppliers, can be a powerful one. For Britney Hoskins, owner of event rental company Top Pic Collective, the draft is transformational. Her company is supplying luxury furnishings for several VIP draft events. Top Pic Collective is Michigan’s largest Black-owned event rental company, but, says Hoskins, “the next size up from us is ten times bigger than us.”

For Hoskins, the impact of the draft on her business “isn’t so much dollars and cents,” so much as it is that “we’re in the room now” for larger events in Detroit like Afro Nation music, art and dance festival and the Rocket Mortgage Golf Classic. Participating as a vendor in the 2024 NFL draft has allowed her to buy more tables and chairs, which, in turn, lets her throw her hat in for larger projects in Detroit down the line. “For us to be a major supplier in the draft,” she says, “really has impacted the industry in how they look at us. We have a lot of trickle down from there . . . we’re going to tap a lot of other businesses on the shoulder” for future events.

And there will be more, and bigger, events in Detroit to bolster small businesses like Hoskins’s. On that everyone agrees. Hosting the draft in Detroit is just one step in a larger journey to welcome many more tourists and host many more large-scale events, says Molinari of Visit Detroit. That includes the NCAA Final Four tournament in 2027, another big draw for the city’s tourism and hospitality industry. “Whatever preconceived notions some people have,” he says, “I think they’re going to be really excited. We always say if we can get them here”—that is, convince people to travel to Detroit—“we’ll get them here.”