Detroit reportedly is moving to take control of the massive Packard Automotive Plant on the east side, a hulking relic it first tried to foreclose on 14 years ago.
"The city is preparing to seize the Packard Plant because of unpaid taxes," Steve Neavling reports on his Motor City Muckraker blog.
The ownership of the plant has been in dispute for years. The current owner is reportedly Dominic Cristini, whom the city maintains has never paid any taxes on the property.
Cristini maintains he owes no taxes because the city won’t provide basic services to protect his property from arsonists, vandals and thieves.
"The city can kiss my ass," Cristini said in a frank, wide-ranging interview. "It's taxation without representation. . . . Do me a favor and knock the Packard down. I’m tired of it. . . I don’t want to get killed over that building.”
In 1998, when Detroit first tried to seize the site for back taxes, Cristini won a court decision to keep it. That case continued in the courts for several more years.
Neavling, who doesn't attribute his foreclosure prediction, notes that such a move would add problems for the Bing administration, which has plenty of issues to worry about.
The uninsured city would shoulder a huge liability and is in no financial shape to demolish the concrete industrial buildings that are loaded with asbestos and other health hazards. The city already is overwhelmed with thousands of derelict properties.
The 3.5 million-square-foot factory on East Grand Boulevard, designed by noted architect Albert Kahn, was a car assembly plant from 1903-56. Other businesses used it until the late 1990s, and one small chemical processing operation remains on the premises.
Now it's "a haven for graffiti artists, urban explorers, paintballers and auto scrappers," the landmark's Wikipedia entry says. "Scavengers have extensively stripped the buildings of wiring and other building materials."
