Healthcare: New medical center to open in Dearborn
by Melissa Burden for The Detroit News
Oakwood Healthcare Inc. and a real estate developer are preparing to open a medical building early next month on the downtown site here where the former Montgomery Ward store was a longtime fixture.
The $80 million Dearborn Town Center, which will hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Dec. 15 and is scheduled to open Jan. 3, will mark the second time that the health care system has teamed with a real estate company on a development, a practice Oakwood plans to continue on future developments.
Oakwood and its Midwest Medical Center partnered with Southfield-based REDICO Management Inc. to construct the three-story, 168,000-square-foot medical office building.
They built from the ground up after demolishing the old Montgomery Ward store, which filled a city block and closed in 2001 along with 249 other stores when the Chicago-based retail chain went out of business.
The brick-and-limestone building at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Schaefer will include family practice doctors, specialists, a pharmacy, a lab, 24-hour urgent care and operating rooms for same-day ambulatory surgery.
“It’s a full spectrum of services at one location,” Brian Connolly, president and CEO of Dearborn-based Oakwood, said earlier this week during a private champagne reception and tour.
Dearborn Town Center will house the multi-specialty Midwest Medical Center, which is relocating from its nearby Dearborn location.
“We outgrew our space,” said Dr. Mark B. Saffer, president and founder of Midwest Medical Center, which sees more than 200,000 patients a year and offers 19 different specialties. “We needed something larger.”
Midwest will have more than 500 employees at the site, including workers who will move and new hires, said Saffer, who declined to specify the number of new employees.
The Midwest Health Plan, a separately run insurance company, also will lease space in the building, which will include Oakwood physician offices, ophthalmology and optometry, a dentist office and even a restaurant.
While REDICO’s Watchowski and Oakwood’s Connolly declined to provide details on the financial partnership, Connolly said Oakwood is in the process of securing financing to make Oakwood the general partner in the building, with REDICO keeping minority ownership.
Future Oakwood building projects likely will be done with developers because of the problems in raising money in Michigan’s economy, Connolly said. That is how Oakwood completed a recent surgical center, he said.
“Historically in this market, most health care systems design and build and own medical office buildings,” Connolly said. “With the difficulty in raising capital to fund the medical office buildings, a number of health care systems have taken the route of working with developers to share in the financial risk.”
Other southeastern Michigan hospital systems such as Beaumont Hospitals have teamed up with developers who construct buildings, while Beaumont leases space in them.
Further construction is in the works on the Dearborn Town Center site. REDICO plans to build another structure along Schaefer with 22,000 square feet for medical retail and office space and an about 100-unit senior housing project, likely assisted living, said Dale L. Watchowski, president and CEO of REDICO.
“We think in the next 18 months, we’ll be looking at starting construction on that,” Watchowski said of the senior housing project. The timing for building the retail project will depend on market demand, he said.
The city of Dearborn, which in 2007 sold REDICO the five-acre site for $3.35 million, built a $10.8-million municipal parking garage with more than 500 parking spaces for the development, said Brian Murray, Dearborn’s director of economic and community development.
Midwest Medical Center and REDICO formed a partnership on the development three years ago, Saffer said. In January 2009, Oakwood bought five Midwest Medical Center facilities from Saffer.
