Representatives for the Detroit Pistons organization on Oct. 8 laid out the latest plans for building a headquarters and practice facility for Detroit’s future WNBA team on the city’s east riverfront.
They also made assurances that the location — a former industrial site that was left heavily polluted — would be remediated and made safe for the indoor and outdoor youth playing fields that also would be built there as part of the overall project.
The women’s basketball facility and the youth fields would go on a 42-acre site that is just west of the bridge to Belle Isle. The land, now owned by the city, was previously occupied by a Uniroyal tire factory that shut down in 1980 and was demolished.
The project’s developer is a corporate entity affiliated with the Pistons and the NBA team’s owner, Tom Gores, called W-Detroit Property LLC. Gores and a group of investors made a successful bid earlier this year to bring a WNBA team back to Detroit, starting with the 2029 season. The team has yet to be named.
The WNBA team and the practice facility will have common ownership, a Pistons representative said.
To help with the site’s environmental cleanup, the project’s development team is requesting a Brownfield tax capture, valued at $40.6 million over 30 years.
The Pistons affiliate also intends to seek a commercial property tax abatement for the site valued at $9.1 million.
Several Pistons representatives and project consultants presented the practice facility and youth field plans at a late afternoon meeting of the Detroit Brownfield Redevelopment Authority’s community advisory committee.
Committee members ultimately decided to wait until after an Oct. 15 public meeting on the project before making any decision. The project also is subject to approval by Detroit City Council.
The WNBA team’s practice facility would be about 75,000 square feet in size and cost about $50 million, according to planning documents. Construction is expected to start in 2027 and finish in time for the 2029 WNBA season, which typically begins in May.
Next door would be the approximately 100,000-square-foot youth development academy, along with multiple indoor and outdoor youth athletic fields for sports including, but not limited to, basketball, soccer, volleyball and flag football.
“The vision around that is to give kids here and around Detroit a place to play, a place to learn, a place to grow,” Richard Haddad, the Pistons chief operating officer, said.
The project’s youth components would be developed, owned and operated by a separate nonprofit entity. Haddad said that the timeline and anticipated costs for the youth components have yet to be determined.
While the Pistons-affiliated entity would develop and own the WNBA practice facility, the land beneath it would remain city property and the Pistons affiliate would have a ground lease, planning documents says.
An 18-inch surface cover
An environmental consultant for the project, Adam Patton of Pinchin, fielded multiple questions from the committee regarding known contaminants on the site and whether it would really be safe for youth to play there in the future.
Patton said that contaminated soil would be shipped to a landfill and a 18-inch surface cover of clean soil would be spread across the entire site.
The surface cover would be laid over a “demarcation barrier,” he said, “and that demarcation barrier … provides a confirmatory, visual indication of where the dirty dirt stops, where the clean soil starts.”
“You have 18 inches of that material,” he said, “and then ultimately you’ll end up having grass on top of that.”
As for what old contaminates were found, Patton said the western portion of the site primarily had heavy metals, some petroleum compounds and various organic compounds.
The center contained the old Uniroyal factory, and that area was found to have heavy petroleum, some polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs and “a lot of metals.”
The site’s eastern portion had primarily heavy metals and some petroleoum compounds, he said.
It was previously reported that a 14-acre portion of the site was environmentally remediated at a cost of over $30 million, primarily picked up by DTE Energy.
The Pistons affiliate also will be getting $2.5 million to put toward the new clean-up effort, with $1.5 million coming from a past legal settlement concerning the site and $1 million from a grant from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.
Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on X @JCReindl
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Pistons reps share latest plan for Detroit WNBA facility, youth fields
