Remember the Poletown case? Sure you do. That was the infamous decision of a divided Michigan Supreme Court, that permitted the eminent domain taking of the Detroit community of Poletown in order to raze it and turn over its site to General Motors for a new Cadillac plant. The taking displaced an unoffending, diverse community, razing hundreds of homes, businesses and churches, as well as a major hospital, in order to subsidize GM which threatened to build this facility in Ohio, unless Detroit ponied up. It did. This caper cost the taxpayers some $200 million and it spared GM having to pay its full tax share. It was supposed to produce thousands of jobs. But it didn’t. By the time the dispatch about closing this plant came from the Detroit Free Press, there were only 1500 employees at that plant instead the 5000 that were promised.
See https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/john-gallagher/2018/11/26/gm-detroit-hamtramck-plant-closing/2114067002/ (cut and paste this link in your browser).
And of course, as you may remember, eventually GM filed for bankruptcy in the 2008 Great Recession anyway and defaulted on a bunch of bonds held by individual investors trying to save for their old age. In a case of too little and too late, in due course the Michigan Supreme Court came to its senses and overruled the Poletown case in Wayne County v. Hathcock.
And so Detroit joins the list of similar venues in which much was promised but little or nothing delivered after wasting fortunes in public funds and grossly undercompensating the displaced condemnee-owners of land in the path of such projects.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Your faithful servant, along with the late Bert Burgoyne of Detroit, and Toby Brigham the lion of Miami, were counsel in that case, representing the Sisters of Mercy, owners of that taken hospital.