City Modern wraps in Brush Park, Detroit's first ground-up neighborhood in decades

Bedrock declared its City Modern neighborhood complete in Brush Park on July 24, 2025, closing out a build that began in 2015 on an eight-acre stretch of mostly empty lots just north of downtown.

The finished neighborhood holds 450 residences, according to Bedrock's announcement. It runs to 20 newly constructed buildings plus three rehabilitated Victorian mansions that were carved into five high-end condos. The site sits between John R Street, Edmund Place, and Beaubien Street, across from Little Caesars Arena.

"City Modern is the first major ground-up neighborhood built in Detroit since the 1980s," Dan Gilbert, Bedrock's founder and chairman, said in the announcement. "We didn't just build housing, we rebuilt a community."

When the work started, more than 80 percent of Brush Park's lots sat empty, a stretch where Gilded Age mansions had been razed or left to rot for decades, per DBusiness. Bedrock leaned on six architecture firms for the design: Hamilton Anderson Associates, Merge Architects, Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects, Studio Dwell, McIntosh Poris Architects, and Christian Hurttienne.

The housing mix spans price points. The Residences at City Modern make up 286 rental apartments across eight buildings. The Flats, opened in 2019 at 124 Alfred Street, hold 54 affordable units reserved for residents 55 and older. Hunter Pasteur built the 53 Carriage Homes, duplex-style units off shared courtyards, and 52 for-sale Townhomes. The three salvaged mansions round it out with five condos.

Street-level retail totals 31,000 square feet. Tenants include Brush Park Bodega, a corner cafe and market, the Brushery dental practice, and Leña, a wood-fired restaurant drawing on Spain's Basque and Catalan cooking.

For Mona Ross Gardner, who grew up in Brush Park and now presides over the Brush Park Community Development Corporation, the turnaround is hard to overstate. She told CBS Detroit the area she remembered held "a lot of drug use, abandoned houses, dilapidated homes everywhere. There were very few people that actually lived here." Gardner sat on the committee that picked Bedrock to take on the work.

Brush Park now counts roughly a dozen other developments built or rising nearby. City Modern was the catalyst.

124 Alfred St. (Flats) / 2660 John R St. (Residences), Detroit