However, as someone else said, you don't renovate these kind of properties because it's cheaper than building a generic business park. You do it because you're willing to spend extra for something with history and character.
Look at the last sale price of this building, $535.00 five hundred!!
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/530-Kenilworth-St-Detroit-...
Sale prices obscure some of the more expensive parts of a sale -- leins on the title and back taxes. Sometimes you do get a property for cheap, but always do your due diligence.
Here's another example:
http://www.thecmaninn.com/claremont/about-us/history.aspx
Here's an older paper from the state of RI:
http://www.planning.ri.gov/documents/tp/TP%20150.pdf
So one note from that paper: northern RI alone had 10mil sq ft of vacant mill building space.
That's a lot. It will take a lot of rebuilding to come close to reclaiming all the space in those old buildings.
Also, those old buildings didn't always take into account things like, say, HVAC efficiency. That kind of retrofitting takes money.
Is this a project you'd still be interested in?
I'm often surprised by the ways businesses behave. I was in northern MA last month at a tech company that had recently built a new office building. Not 5 miles away was the town center, which was once a manufacturing hub. In town there were a couple old brick textile factories that were absolutely beautiful old buildings sitting vacant. Those building seem like the exact thing i've seen a couple startups trying to simulate in an office building (hard wood floors, retro lamps, etc with modern open floor plan). Running a medium sized tech company out of a 200 year old textile factory says something, but no one apparently wants to say it. Sure there would be some remodeling expense putting in power/etc but I can't imagine its a huge fraction more than long term rental/ownership/maint of the crap buildings being thrown up that start to fall apart after 10 years.