Poletown

[Detroit_uke]

Have you read - Poletown: Community Betrayed by Jeannie Wylie [[Kellermann)?

[rjk]

^Yeah, I'm going to try to track one down this week. I plan to call up a few used book stores.

Anyone see the documentary "Poletown Lives?" I'd love to check that out if I could find out where to pick up a copy.

[Mikeg]

Especially hurtful is that the plant never produced the number of jobs promised...... The Poletown plant was intended to be "modern" yet its use of land is horrendous. Acres of asphalt surround the building for little economic reason. At the very time GM should have been adjusting its business practices to become more nimble and embrace the "just in time" method, they build a plant that allowed them to crank out the cars and just park them until they were needed.

Your criticisms are completely unfounded. Examining the footprint areas of the Packard and GM plants shows that the single story GM Plant has around twice the footprint as the four story Packard buildings. Setting aside any differences in production rates and purchased content, that indicates that the GM production facility design was about twice as efficient in its use of floorspace. Single story production facilities are a necessity to support "just in time" methods, which by the way, were used at Detroit-Hamtramck for the delivery and consumption of purchased components [[note: "just in time" does not include the ordering and delivery of finished vehicles to dealers and consumers). The Packard facility was designed in a different era, when plants relied on rail for moving almost all inbound materials and much of their finished product. Back then, public streets near the plant were even used to temporarily store finished vehicles pending shipment, something that neither the manufacturer or the public would ever tolerate 60 years later.

And lest you think that the GM test track was was a unnecessary use of land, here's a 1935 Packard brochure that indicates Packard shipped every one of their "top of the line" Packard V-12's by rail to their proving grounds in Shelby Township for a short test drive and shakedown, as well as a sampling of their other vehicles.

The bottom line is that the city of Detroit was faced with the impending closure of the Fisher Body Fleetwood and Cadillac Clark St. plants due to their obsolence. This was because the next-generation replacement products for those being built there in the late 1970s and early 80s were going to be "body frame integral" designs that could not be built using the old model of building bodies at Fleetwood and transporting them by a fleet of body trucks on the streets of Detroit over to the Clark St. plant. GM planned to replace those plants with a new one by the mid 1980s and it was either going to be a greenfield plant outside of Detroit or a brownfield plant within the city limits - but only if the city could quickly assemble a site large enough to meet GM's production needs.

As for your charge that the promised jobs never materialized, I'd like to see your proof. The original plan was for the Fleetwood and Clark St. plants to close when the Detroit-Hamtramck opened and for their workers to transfer there as it ramped up production. However, even though they were getting "long in the tooth", the continuing popularity of GM's midsize body on frame "G" cars provided jobs at Fleetwood and Clark St. for several more years after the Detroit-Hamtramck plant went into production.

Personally, I think the decisions and methods used by the city of Detroit to acquire the land they offered to GM were wrong. Personal property rights should trump those of the government's.