Forces align to rekindle a Michigan city

In its prime, Flint, Mich., was the heartbeat that furiously pumped General Motors vehicles onto the road.

At its lowest, in the years after GM cut production in the town and closed its Buick City assembly plant in 1996, Flint was a city of industrial and commercial vacancies, viewed as one of the most dangerous cities in America, and a city where residents couldn't drink the water.

Michigan and local officials believe there is a new life for Flint - a city that often symbolized the image of Rust Belt America. And the auto industry is making efforts to reconsider the once booming location.

Ray Scott is such a believer.

Flint is the hometown of Scott, who was recently promoted to CEO of the global seating and electronics giant Lear Corp. Scott led Lear to invest in Flint, with the city's Buick City area serving as the site for Lear's latest assembly and subassembly plant.

Lear needed a new production plant, and Scott admits there was never much doubt that its location would go to Flint. The suburban-Detroit seating and electronics supplier broke ground on the $29.3 million site late last year.

The 156,000-square-foot plant will be the first major supplier plant built in Flint in more than 30 years.

"It used to be one of the largest manufacturing sites in the world," Scott says. "And we all know what's happened to Flint over the years."

Positioning Lear in the city is a win-win, the CEO says. It can serve nearby automakers but also help a hurting community.

"We've done a lot in the city of Detroit," Scott says of Lear, where he has worked since the 1980s. "I felt that if we were going to do something, we had to do it in Flint. It's just who we are. It's the company, and it's how I've been brought up through the company."

To support the project, the Michigan Strategic Fund awarded Lear a performance-based grant of $4.35 million. The city of Flint additionally provided a property tax abatement for the investment.

Janice Karcher, senior vice president of economic development at the Flint and Genesee Chamber of Commerce, says the chamber has been heavily promoting its existing industrial infrastructure-including Buick City-and has received a steady amount of recent investments.

Another auto supplier, C3 Ventures, which makes interior plastic components, invested $9.7 million in a 17.69-acre site on an industrial park in Flint in 2016.

Last year, a Wisconsin-based investment group purchased a 555,000-square-foot former Delphi Automotive location that has been sitting vacant on Flint's east side - another remnant of GM's past footprint in the city. It believes it can redevelop the property and recruit new tenants to the city.

This February, the C.S. Mott Foundation proposed the development of a $23 million, 140-acre industrial park in Buick City with warehousing, light industrial and the potential for about 300 new jobs. The Michigan Economic Development Corp. pledged funding support for the concept, although the plan remains at an early stage.

Karcher believes the new employment that such investments are creating, including Lear's planned 430 new jobs there, will encourage other automotive manufacturers to reconsider the location.

"We're finding that those investments will help create an opportunity for folks in our workforce who are underemployed to move up the ladder," Karcher said.

Flint never quite recovered from the job losses of GM's downsizing. In the late 1970s, the automaker employed over 76,000 people in the Flint area. Today, the number is just over 6,000.

The hope for a comeback is also predicated on encouraging a variety of investment-including nonautomotive-to help diversify an area that was once solely an automotive powerhouse.

"The expectation here is that we are moving toward a much more diverse economy," Karcher said. "We support and welcome as many automotive jobs and companies as possible and, at the same time, know the industry changed so much."

Kristin Dziczek is vice president of the Automotive Communities Partnership in Ann Arbor, Mich., a membership-based program that work to increase automotive investment in the Great Lakes states. Lear's investment in Flint is significant, Dziczek says, because its Buick City site has been orphaned for so long in the Racer Trust, the pool of properties GM created a decade ago to dispose of its abandoned sites.

"Buick City is one of the largest properties in the Racer Trust," Dziczek said. "Moving any manufacturing into a hard-hit area like Flint does have a broader impact on the community than moving into a crowded metropolitan area."

infrastructure issues

Despite the welcome enthusiasm, there were still challenges Lear had to overcome to invest there.

In Lear's initial search for a spot in Flint, Jason Scott, global vice president for Lear's GM seating group, said it appeared at first glance that the brownfield site did not have the necessary infrastructure to support a modern assembly plant.

"We thought we'd go into a brownfield facility," the vice president said of the early plans. "But when we did our due-diligence and site selection, it became very evident that the structure had not been updated in the past 30 years, which forced us to opt for a greenfield-type facility there.

"I think because of the economic and social climate out there with General Motors reducing their workforce in the area, and Buick City closing, there wasn't a desire to update," he continued.

One of the opportunities in re-sparking the vacant Buick City location is that much of its land remains available for greenfield potential. Hundreds of its acres - 360 of them, to be exact - are open for new construction.

Lear now owns 33-acres of Buick City and plans to leave of a third of that undeveloped as its own green space.

But greenery aside, Buick City remains a brownfield designation, Dziczek said, and new uses require the customary site cleanup and subdividing. Lear additionally made improvements for security and health precautions, such as installing additional lighting around the site and implementing a water filtration system. But those add-ons required minimal extra costs, according to the company.

Dziczek says Flint's location favors a GM supply chain. "It's not that far to come to a Ford or FCA plant," she says, "but it is in GM's realm."

Lear's new plant will serve as a just-in-time seat supplier to GM's Flint operations. But it also will demonstrate that suppliers can set up there and extend their reach beyond Flint. The operation also will supply GM's Fort Wayne, Ind., assembly plant.

Another plus for setting up in Flint, says CEO Scott, is that local residents are ready to work.

He thought a few hundred people might show up for a job fair Lear recently held at a Flint community college. Instead, 2,500 people came. Now he's hoping the supply chain will follow Lear's lead.

"Some of our own suppliers could put up a facility," he says. "It's going to take multiple steps like this to get any positive momentum, and hopefully a lot of steps are going to happen."