Maybe the naysayers were right all along.

General Motors' decision to close its Hamtramck assembly plant recalls one of the most bitter development controversies in Michigan's history. Closing the plant will no doubt open old wounds — and raise anew questions of who benefits from such massive urban revitalization projects like the Hamtramck plant.

First, some history. By the early 1980s, then-Mayor Coleman Young was seeking to create jobs for economically distressed Detroit. He agreed to support General Motors’ plan to build its new assembly plant on the border of Detroit and Hamtramck.

But the more than 300-acre site was home to a Polish neighborhood known as Poletown. It featured about 4,000 residents, more than 1,000 houses, several Catholic churches and more than 100 businesses.

Eminent domain cleared way

That neighborhood stood in the way of GM's plant. In a bold and hotly contested move, officials used government's eminent domain powers to seize and raze those properties on GM’s behalf.

It made national news, got people like consumer advocate Ralph Nader involved, and the many protests included a nearly monthlong sit-in at the neighborhood's Immaculate Conception Church that police eventually broke up with arrests.

The opponents took their case to the Michigan Supreme Court, which, in 1981, decided to back the GM project. The court said that taking property from one private owner to give to another private owner in the name of economic development was an acceptable use of eminent domain.

That ruling stood for nearly a quarter century. Then, in 2004, in the Hathcock case involving Wayne County's plans to build an industrial park south of Metro Airport, a more conservative state Supreme Court overturned the Poletown precedent. No longer would the government be allowed to use eminent domain to take land from one private owner and give it to another in the name of creating jobs and tax base.

It's fair to say that Poletown-type seizures had already lost in the court of public opinion. Critics had long claimed that GM's Hamtramck plant never delivered the jobs and economic spin-offs that justified the razing of the Poletown neighborhood. Such complaints were one factor in voters' approval of even tighter restrictions on eminent domain in a 2006 ballot referendum called Proposal 4.

Now, even critics will admit that the Hamtramck plant did deliver many benefits over its nearly 40-year life. Beginning with the Cadillac Eldorado and including models such as the Buick LaCrosse, Chevrolet Malibu and Chevrolet Volt, the plant produced many different products and provided a good living for its UAW-represented workforce, which today numbers about 1,500.

Have we learned anything?

But with the plant now slated for closing by the end of 2019, it's also fair to ask whether it was worth it all. And it's also fair to ask if we've learned anything from the Poletown saga. For even if eminent domain powers have been curtailed and a project like the Hamtramck plant would not be possible today, cities, counties and the state still swing at every pitch that promises a bonanza of jobs and tax base.

There was the Foxconn project that went to Wisconsin. There was the national feeding frenzy over Amazon's second headquarters. And there were the lucrative tax incentives given for projects like the District Detroit that surrounds Little Caesars Arena.

Even without Poletown-type seizures, officials still court these huge economic deals even though they threaten to elbow out existing urban uses.

Isn't it just a little schizophrenic that, at the same time, urban planners like Detroit planning director Maurice Cox are doing all they can to create new walkable urban neighborhoods? They hope to create districts where residents can live, work, shop, and find recreation opportunities all within a 20-minute walk — districts, in other words, like the Poletown neighborhood wiped out by the GM project.

Read more:

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I suppose a great city can support projects like Foxconn and Amazon and at the same time work to enhance lively walkable districts in its neighborhoods.

But when push comes to shove, officials still more often will choose the big-bang projects, with their glittering promises of jobs and tax base, over the quieter neighborhood revitalization work.

It's a conundrum.

As William Faulkner once said, the past isn't dead, it isn't even past. So now, nearly 40 years after Detroit agreed to wipe out a neighborhood to create an auto plant, don't be surprised if the wounds still bleed, the memories remain strong and the questions do not go away.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.