The Last Days of Poletown

A neighborhood faces doom and a new auto plant may rise

The sign above a brick archway in the basement of Immaculate Conception Church in the Poletown neighborhood of Detroit reads GM—MARK OF DESTRUCTION. It is a wry twist on the "mark of excellence" slogan of the General Motors Corp., but none of the few dozen mostly elderly and Polish-American homeowners gathered in the room last week were laughing. Members of the Poletown Neighborhood Council, they are engaged in a battle to save their neighborhood as the city of Detroit prepares to raze some 1,500 private homes, schools and businesses in order to make way for GM's new $500 million assembly plant.

The mood at the meeting was more upbeat than usual; lawyers for the group had just filed suit in Federal District Court to block the plant. Helping the council in its fight is Ralph Nader, a longtime nemesis of GM, who was invited into the fray by area residents last year. Thus, by all appearances, the battle is a classic confrontation: a heartless corporation vs. a handful of citizens trying to preserve a way of life—which for many of them dates back to the turn of the century, when their immigrant ancestors arrived from Poland to make a new life for themselves in America.

But Poletown's plight is, of course, not so simply put. When the GM plant is completed in 1983, it will employ 6,000 workers in a city where unemployment is at 18%. It will also contribute an initial $8.1 million a year in tax revenues to Detroit and the enclosed city of Hamtramck, where only 15 months ago the huge Chrysler assembly plant known as Dodge Main was closed. The GM factory will also offer new hope to a decaying city that has hemorrhaged hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past decade and currently faces a record budget deficit of more than $135 million. Some 3,400 people will be forced to move to make way for the plant, but as the Detroit Free Press editorializes: "It's a difficult call, but it is an essential step in rebuilding the city's economic base."

The confrontation began shaping up last June, when GM announced the closing of two outmoded Detroit plants that employed 6,000 people. At the same time, however, the company declared its intention to build a modern factory within the city limits if a suitable site could be found. Mayor Coleman Young lost no tune in taking GM up on its offer. After examining a dozen possible sites, the city finally decided to offer GM a 465-acre tract that not only included the shuttered Dodge Main plant but also swallowed up the surrounding 250 acres of Poletown. GM insisted that the new plant had to be built and in operation by early 1983, so Young took advantage of a recent Michigan law allowing a city to acquire land for use by private enterprise. Detroit began a crash program of forcing home and business owners to sell their properties to the city.