Originally Posted by
professorscott
Well, 'Tonk, you make an excellent point. There are two completely different things going on here, so let's separate them.
1. Ridership projections: complete voodoo, as I said, performed in order to convince Uncle Sugar to toss us a few shekels. [[And, of course, it worked.) No other purpose.
2. Effect on the value of property in the corridor: easily predicted, though within a considerable band, and easily studied. That's one of the things we focused on when we went to Portland eight or nine years ago, and it was remarkable, and occurred in city after city, and was, really, why the thing was built. Dan Gilbert wasn't buying up property in the corridor, frantically, as a blind guess. He saw what happened elsewhere and believed it would be replicated in Detroit, since there was no reason for it not to, and in fact it was.
So you make an excellent point. Mr. Penske and Mr. Gilbert, the Ilitch family and so on are philanthropists as far as it goes, but they also understand the potential upside to their philanthropy. To which I say [[and you are free to disagree) there's nothing wrong with that.