The Most Expensive House in Detroit

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 5, 6:40AM EST

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Leaving aside a huge Victorian home that is currently for sale and operates as a bed and breakfast, the most expensive house in Detroit is for sale for $1,200,000. That is about the same as a high-end one bedroom apartment in Manhattan.

The house at 450 Keelson Drive has everything a splendid mansion should have, other than that it is in the largest dying city in America, and one of the most dangerous. Among the amenities, the house sits on a canal that runs into the Detroit River, has four bedrooms and three baths, and at 3,400 square feet, it sits on a modest 0.84 acres. Presumably, the canal location offers a spot for a boat.

The house is old — very old. It was built in 1929, part of a small building spree of expensive homes, presumably for car company executives, or management at companies that provided the car companies with parts. The real estate listing for 450 Keelson Drive says it has been “renovated,” which would make sense for a house that is 85 years old.

At $1.2 million, a home like 450 Keelson Drive would sell for several million dollars in Greenwich, Conn., or the wealthy suburbs of any other American city of any size. One sign of the trouble of Detroit’s decline is the houses being auctioned off for as little as $1,000 by Building Detroit. There are scores of these, some of which will eventually be bulldozed into the ground. Detroit’s government cannot afford to provide emergency services to the entire city. Some parts do not even have working street lights.

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With a population that has been halved since 1950 and stands at less than 700,000, it is impossible that Detroit will ever have much of a tax base. Many residents are poor, and many large companies fled the city a long time ago.

It would be a sign of recovery if the price of homes like the one at 450 Keelson Avenue soared into the millions of dollars. That won’t happen. The most expensive houses in Detroit likely will never sell for much more than $1 million, and possibly less.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.