For rent - Cities look to fill empty auto plants
Henry Ford's great-grandson arrived at the shuttered auto plant to brag about a plan to revive the vast empty space: Investors would transform it into a modern factory to make solar panels and high-tech energy systems instead of Town Cars and Thunderbirds.
"I can't imagine a better way to reuse the facility," Bill Ford said during his visit to the former Wixom Assembly plant in September.
Several months later, a plan that exists only on paper is still awaiting final approval. The plant is still vacant, just like scores of other cavernous auto factories across the nation that have never been redeveloped.
An Associated Press analysis illustrates the scope of the problem: Of 128 manufacturing plants in North America closed since 1980 by the Detroit Three automakers and their largest suppliers, three of every five now sit idle.
At their peak, these roaring engines of economic activity employed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly well-paid union members on the assembly line and white-collar engineers in windowed offices above the factory floor.
Those 128 plants had a payroll of 196,000 workers at the time they closed. Today, only 36,500 people work at those sites that have been redeveloped, and at only three of the revived plants does the number of employees match or exceed the number in their carmaking past. The rest are concrete prairies or steel behemoths waiting for reuse or a wrecking ball, most without any real prospects for new use.
"The cost is going to be borne by the next generation," said James Rubenstein, a professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who has studied U.S. auto plant closings and openings. "It's the children and grandchildren of the laid-off workers. They won't have the opportunities in those communities."
When factories closed decades ago, many workers just moved to a new plant nearby. But sharp cutbacks in the auto industry mean those jobs will probably never return. "These are genuine closures that aren't being replaced," Rubenstein said.
Source: For rent - Cities look to fill empty auto plants
"I can't imagine a better way to reuse the facility," Bill Ford said during his visit to the former Wixom Assembly plant in September.
Several months later, a plan that exists only on paper is still awaiting final approval. The plant is still vacant, just like scores of other cavernous auto factories across the nation that have never been redeveloped.
An Associated Press analysis illustrates the scope of the problem: Of 128 manufacturing plants in North America closed since 1980 by the Detroit Three automakers and their largest suppliers, three of every five now sit idle.
At their peak, these roaring engines of economic activity employed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly well-paid union members on the assembly line and white-collar engineers in windowed offices above the factory floor.
Those 128 plants had a payroll of 196,000 workers at the time they closed. Today, only 36,500 people work at those sites that have been redeveloped, and at only three of the revived plants does the number of employees match or exceed the number in their carmaking past. The rest are concrete prairies or steel behemoths waiting for reuse or a wrecking ball, most without any real prospects for new use.
"The cost is going to be borne by the next generation," said James Rubenstein, a professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who has studied U.S. auto plant closings and openings. "It's the children and grandchildren of the laid-off workers. They won't have the opportunities in those communities."
When factories closed decades ago, many workers just moved to a new plant nearby. But sharp cutbacks in the auto industry mean those jobs will probably never return. "These are genuine closures that aren't being replaced," Rubenstein said.
Source: For rent - Cities look to fill empty auto plants
