Detroit targets old industry sites to improve neighborhoods

DETROIT (AP) — Mahalie Wilson lives in the shadow of Detroit’s massive and vacant former Packard auto plant and says she has learned to just “deal with” her foreboding brick neighbor. But after years of fighting with one owner after another, the city aims to raze part of the building and possibly find other uses for the rest. Detroit and other cities are looking to get rid of large eyesores to open up those spaces for redevelopment. For Detroit, that could mean rebuilding now mostly Black neighborhoods that thrived when factories were built decades ago and before the whites who worked in them moved away.