the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Sep 16, 2019
The Greyhound Bus station in Detroit is located right at the edge of downtown. It’s in a prime location.
So, it is no surprise that its owner, the Michigan Department of Transportation, apparently plans to sell the current Greyhound station location to unknown developers for possible retail, parking or high end housing.
MDOT has leased this location to Greyhound for 30 years. Greyhound has 49 bus routes, serving about 1,000 passengers daily. People who ride the bus overwhelmingly tend to be working class people, who depend on public or Greyhound bus transportation. And while MDOT has offered temporary locations, these alternatives seem unrealistic, since they include a tiny Amtrak train station located a couple of miles north that already can’t accommodate the train passengers’ cars; or at a central transit center downtown that already can’t accommodate the current city bus traffic.
So no big surprise. The fate of Greyhound is just the most recent in a whole host of cannibalizing that has taken place in the center of Detroit, where ordinary people have been pushed out from their homes, their small businesses, and now, a mode of transportation they depend on to travel. As the media touts that Detroit is “coming back”, what we are really seeing is that more and more, prime locations in the city are being handed over to wealthy developers.