New year, new owner, new plan.

The former Dearborn Hyatt Regency’s new ownership has a vision to turn the 18-story tower nestled between the city’s two downtown districts into a combination of apartments and hotel rooms.

Ghassan Abdelnour of Farmington Hills-based GAV & Associates Inc. said the plan is for 242 apartments on the sixth through 18th floors, while the third, fourth and fifth floors would be set aside for some 216 hotel rooms. The bottom floors would be retail.

Abdelnour, who represents the new owner Willowbrook LLC, is going before the Dearborn Planning Commission next month, and more details could be spelled out then.

It’s the latest step toward bringing the hotel back to life. 

Bloomfield Capital lent $16.49 million to RH Dearborn Redevelopment LLC, the previous owner, in October 2021, property records say. New York-based Rhodium Capital Advisors, through RH Dearborn Redevelopment, paid $18.25 million for it.

Rhodium said in October 2021 that it planned to turn the hotel, which sits on more than 23 acres at the northwest interchange of the Southfield Freeway and Michigan Avenue, into hundreds of apartments. But that never materialized, and the hotel, which was at one point connected to the Fairlane Town Center shopping mall with a second-floor monorail, remains vacant.

It closed in 2018 after being frozen as part of a Canadian legal case against its former owner, Xiao Hua “Edward” Gong, who was charged with fraud and money laundering in connection with the sale of worthless stock certificates from 2012 to 2017, which he denied.

The hotel was known as the Dearborn Hyatt Regency until the fall of 2012, when Hyatt Corp. ended its decades-long management of the facility.