Southfield’s Cornerstone Development Authority today will launch its Southfield Healthcare Corridor, an alliance of health care employers that will try to court for-profit businesses to the re-dev-elopment district.
Executive Director Al Aceves said the authority is forming a health care advisory committee to be overseen by a board of its member health care employers, which will oversee economic attraction and try to streamline local government approvals.
The corridor also will include an “economic gardening” strategy focusing on local business expansion. Aceves said organizers also would like to pursue a health-themed business incubator or accelerator.
At least a dozen businesses related to health care account for more than 6,000 jobs within the 1.5-square-mile district, which falls mainly between Northwestern Highway and Greenfield Road from Eight Mile Road to Mt. Vernon Street, Aceves said.
They include St. John Providence Hospital, a Southfield office of Detroit-based Health Alliance Plan with more than 450 employees, the 10,000-square-footNorthland Park Dialysis Center and a CSL Plasma center.
The authority also expects a physical-therapy office to move to the district soon.
Aceves said more than 350 health care employers have locations in Southfield.
The corridor will collaborate with Oakland County’s Medical Main Street Program, an alliance of hospitals, universities, pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers and medical professionals. The alliance was founded in 2008 in a coordinated business development campaign that could create up to 45,000 jobs in health care by 2018.
“It fits in well with the Main Street initiative, and it helps that Southfield has built on it and looked at what they can do specifically,” said Maureen Donohue Krauss, director of economic development and community affairs for Oakland County.
The district “really focuses more on the service end of the industry, from what I’ve seen, at least at its core. But business that operate near the core, like vendors to supply senior living centers or hospitals, could fit.”
The city and its development authority actively will target for-profit health care employers for attraction or expansion, Aceves said. That could include insurers, medical-device manufacturers and even information technology or staffing companies with a health care industry focus, as opposed to adding new nonprofit hospital centers.
