[Gen.Blather]

“I challenge anyone to find a parcel of land anywhere near a major U.S. inner city that could accommodate an operation like that.”

I accidentally took a wrong exit and ended up in Detroit. If you’d showed me black and white photos and told me it was post WWII Berlin, I’d have believed it. Block after block of burned out and boarded up buildings. I suspect if Toyota had wanted to relocate there Detroit would have condemned and seized the required land. The reason Toyota located where they did was because the tax and non-union labor structure enabled them to move there and be profitable. Detroit can’t make a deal like that as the union/government stranglehold on the area is too great.

The Obama administration wanted to force winners of a particular army contract to locate in Detroit. General Dynamics won by saying they’d build the stuff in “Detroit.” By that they meant the postal code, which is nowhere near the actual city. (Although, it is in what the employees called “the nine-millimeter drop zone.” So called because you can find expended bullets fired from Detroit in the parking lot.) GD moved other business that was being built in that plant to a different plant, so the additional jobs presupposed by the contract didn’t actually exist.

[wildcard_redneck]

"I challenge anyone to find a parcel of land anywhere near a major U.S. inner city that could accommodate an operation like that.”

There is plenty of vacant land in Detroit

[Alberta's Child]

That's a good point, but Detroit is a whole different story. It had a population of 1.85 million after the 1950 census, making it the fifth-largest city in the U.S.

Today, it is ranked at #27 with a population of less than 640,000 -- and that number is declining over time.

The area you describe in Detroit isn't an "inner city" area at all. It's an amalgamation of massive tracts of land that serve no purpose anymore.