Buckfire is raising the question of what is Detroit's multi-decade land-use strategy five years removed from bankruptcy at a time when Mayor Mike Duggan is focused on a plan to wipe out residential blight by 2024 through a taxpayer-funded $250 million bond he wants to put before voters in March.

At the same time, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' $2.5 billion investment in its Mack Avenue and Jefferson North plants coupled with suppliers seeking to be close to renewed automotive manufacturing on Detroit's east side have Duggan's administration scrambling to capitalize on the moment.

Duggan said last week the city has to clear more industrial land to assemble the 30-acre contiguous parcels manufacturers need to build modern, single-level factories.

It's the kind of open land Detroit lacked after the end of World War II when the automakers started venturing out into the cornfields of Macomb County, Downriver Wayne County and far-flung exurbs like Orion Township and Romeo to build automotive assembly and parts plants.

But the mayor's office is treading lightly on the sensitive subject of land clearing because it invokes raw memories in this town of Coleman Young razing the Poletown neighborhood to help General Motors open a new assembly plant straddling the Hamtramck border in 1985.

Today's Detroit mayor lacks the power of eminent domain to seize private property for economic development as the 1980s Detroit mayor possessed, complicating the city's ability to assemble land short of buying out the remaining few residents on whole city blocks decimated by decades of abandonment.

"It is a delicate balance to make sure that you're doing things in the best interest of all of the residents," said Damon Jordan, managing director of real estate and development at Real Estate Services LLC in Detroit, who previously worked at the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. "Some of the original zoning actually happens to be industrial and actually happens to lend itself to being the first starting point of where you plan out a strategy to transition that sparse residential (area)."

In Delray in southwest Detroit, the city has been actively buying out and relocating residents who live on the east and west sides of the 167-acre site destined to become the U.S. port of entry and customs plaza for the new Gordie Howe International Bridge. This is a case where there's a strategy in place for the long-term planning of this once-vibrant neighborhood.

But at this point, the Duggan administration is not prescribing a future for other hollowed-out neighborhoods where 19,000 blighted and abandoned homes will be torn down in the next five years under his bond proposal.

City officials will wait to get input from the remaining residents on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level, said Arthur Jemison, the mayor's group executive for housing, planning and development.

"In those areas that there is vast vacancy, we've got to get neighborhood input about what should be there," Jemison said in an interview. "That's just the way we're doing demolition here."

While the mayor's office doesn't want to publicly designate certain residential sections of the city as destined to be the future site of another auto parts supplier plant, it's not unreasonable to assume that they're at least thinking about it.

Two generations ago, the I-94 Industrial Park northeast of the I-75 and I-94 interchange was a residential neighborhood. Some of the original residential streets were still visible as recently as five years ago.

Now it's a mostly built-out park of industrial facilities such as Linc Logistics' warehousing operation for General Motors Co., ArcelorMittal Tailored Blanks' plant where high-strength, laser-welded steel blanks are produced for automakers and Flex-N-Gate's new plant, which is pumping out dozens of parts going into the new Ford Ranger being assembled at Ford Motor Co.'s Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne.

And the Duggan administration has been laying the groundwork for two years for potentially portioning off a piece of the underutilized 264-acre Coleman A. Young International Airport for industrial redevelopment.

To secure FCA's new Jeep assembly plant, the mayor's office closed a section of St. Jean Street, bulldozed a berm and swapped land all across the city to assemble more than 200 acres of land around the two plants — and then gave it all to the global automaker as part of an incentives package.

Duggan's other main selling point to the Auburn Hills automaker is that the city has the under-employed population base to fill FCA's need for 5,000 new workers. Finding those workers in some exurb could have been problematic, he said.

"We know that if we can deliver quickly, cut through the bureaucracy, get the permits done quickly that we've got the workforce here that wants to work hard and be trained — and we think that's the formula," Duggan said at the opening night of Detroit Homecoming in the former State Savings Bank building on Fort Street. "And now I just have to assemble some more land."

As business and industry have turned back to cities for talent and workers, Detroit has what most developed cities could only dream of: Miles and miles of vacant land, the remnants of a city that was built for 2 million and has been reduced to nearly one-third of its population in 1950.

But there are multitudes of political and private interests to navigate in forging a cogent land-use strategy for the future.