Commercial Real Estate in Southgate, Michigan

About Southgate

For generations after Pierre Michel Campau became the first white settler of record in 1795, this was farm country inside Ecorse Township. Streets were platted in the 1920s, but most of the building came after World War II. When the last of the township land incorporated on October 8, 1958, the new city carried a name its first mayor, Thomas Anderson, tied to a shopping center then under consideration. Local guides give a simpler reading: the south gate to metro Detroit.

That center, Southgate Shopping Center at Eureka and Trenton Roads, opened in 1957 and still explains how the city is organized. Southgate has no traditional main street. Its downtown district is mainly Eureka Road between Allen Road and Fort Street, plus parts of Trenton and Dix-Toledo Roads, and a Downtown Development Authority looks after it. Market Center Park occupies a corner of the shopping center where a large Montgomery Ward store once stood.

Fort Street forms most of the eastern line with Wyandotte, while I-75 and a freight rail line cross the northwest corner. Dix-Toledo Road, where City Hall sits, carried US-25 from 1929 to 1967. Commercial property here is mostly auto-oriented retail: plazas, outlots, freestanding restaurants and service businesses along those roads.