Poletown, Mich., a vibrant multi-cultural neighborhood with 4,200 people, 1,500 homes, 144 businesses, 16 churches, a school and a hospital, was leveled to smoke and dust to build a General Motors Cadillac plant in 1981.

Twenty-five years ago, Father Joseph Karasiewicz, the 59-year-old pastor of Poletown’s Immaculate Conception Church, was removed from power by the Catholic Archdiocese for resisting the bulldozers. He died suddenly of a heart attack a few months after his church was demolished. Many parishioners believed it was due to all the stress.

How did it happen?

Under pressure from GM, the City of Detroit declared in 1981 that it could take private property and transfer it to a profit-making corporation under the U.S. Constitution’s 5th Amendment, which says that land should be taken for “public use.” The Michigan Supreme Court agreed.

Traditionally, the “eminent domain” clause had been interpreted to mean using sovereign power to build a public good like a road, a library or school — not a Fortune 500 corporation. The controversy rages on today, and Poletown is still at center stage.

“Poletown Lives”

The 1981 Detroit/GM battle against the people of Poletown was captured in an award-winning film, "Poletown Lives" by George Corsetti, a grassroots lawyer. Made on a shoestring budget of $5,000, the film depicts demonstrations, police SWAT teams, gun-toting residents, elderly Polish women getting arrested and a city aflame from arsonists.

At one demonstration, Teofilo Lucero, an American Indian and Poletown resident, held a sign that said, “GM murders senior citizens,” as reported by Jean Wylie in 1990. “Now you know what it’s like to be relocated. It is a trail of tears,” he told neighbors.
Today, much of the 650 acres of the Poletown plant is dedicated to sprawling parking lots and neatly landscaped green space. The company uses only one-quarter of the land, and there is no sign of the ferocious battle that took place there. 

The 1981 Environmental Impact Study

An accounting of the health and environmental damage to Poletown and Detroit residents as a result of the razed neighborhood never occurred. On the silver anniversary of its defeat, Poletown needs to assess its wounds for the first time.

The original “Environmental Impact Study” conducted in 1981 was expedited to appease GM’s groundbreaking deadline. Federal funds were released for demolition even before the EIS was completed. After every city, state and federal agency had signed off on the EIS, Poletown residents took the matter into their own hands.

On April 16, 1981, they brought a suit claiming violations of the Clean Air Act, the national Historic Preservation Act and the Environmental Protection Act during demolition. The judge ruled against them, claiming the economic benefits of the factory construction outweighed the environmental cost to Poletown.

The EIS neglected alternate design plans and did not require GM to hire one person at the Poletown plant.

GM promised 6,500 jobs and feeder factories that surrounded the complex, creating thousands of more jobs. That scenario never materialized. Today, the Poletown plant employs approximately 3,000 workers.

Because of the federal government’s Toxic Release Inventory, we know that the GM Poletown assembly center is among the “dirtiest/worst facilities in the U.S.”  Between 1988 and 2002, the Poletown factory emitted 17,632,569 pounds of air pollution. The top cancer risk is from benzene. It is ranked seventh worst in the state of Michigan for “suspected cardiovascular or blood toxicants to air.”

Untold tons of pollution also come out of the exhaust pipes of the defective Cadillacs manufactured at the plant. In 1995, the U.S. Justice Department recalled almost half a million Cadillacs and fined GM nearly $45 million for intentionally overriding emissions controls in the car’s catalytic converters, which resulted in an additional 100,000 tons of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere.

Added to the lost jobs, lost homes and increased air pollution are the people who died directly as a result of the incident. Three elderly people died during the trauma of relocation. Another woman jumped to her death from her apartment building soon after hearing the news. A neighbor who witnessed the plunge suffered a heart attack.

The direct human trauma to Poletown’s estimated 4,200 citizens has yet to be assessed. As part of a retrospective environmental assessment, all of this should be taken into account.

We All Live in Poletown Now

Poletown sprang into the national spotlight again in 2004 when the Michigan Supreme Court reversed its 1981 opinion. A unanimous court wrote, “We must overrule Poletown in order to vindicate our Constitution, protect the people’s property rights and preserve the legitimacy of the judicial branch as the expositor – not creator – of fundamental law.”

But in June 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court trumped the state Supreme Court, affirming property seizures in a 5-4 decision. Writing in dissent, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that small property owners now have little room to maneuver: “The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall or any farm with a factory.”

The issue alarms both the left and the right. The right fears that the decision could conceivably create the legitimacy for a community to condemn a corporation if they argue successfully that a company no longer serves a public use.

Meanwhile, homeowner fights are taking place all over the country in places like Norwood, Ohio (contesting a shopping complex), Long Beach, N.J. (contesting condominiums) and Rivera Beach, Fla., where a mostly black, blue-collar community of 6,000 is fighting an eminent domain attempt to destroy their homes in order to build a yachting and upper-scale residential complex.

On the 25th anniversary of Poletown’s demise, up to 20 state legislatures are considering how to reign in eminent domain. Now is the time for a comprehensive, honest evaluation of the lives forever changed by Poletown.

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Brian McKenna is a medical/environmental anthropologist who teaches at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. He teaches a number of courses there, including “Indians of North America” and “Doing Anthropology.”  He is currently working on a book titled, “We All Live in Company Town USA.”