Buick City: the world's biggest GM complex, now mostly open ground

Stand on Flint’s north side today and you’re looking at a few hundred acres of cleared ground where the largest General Motors complex in the world once roared. They called it Buick City, and at its mid-1980s peak some 28,000 people clocked in there to build cars across a sprawling stretch of plants that ran for blocks.

The name fit. This wasn’t one factory but a city of them — foundries, an assembly line, parts shops, the whole arc of building a Buick under one banner. It grew out of the original Buick works, the very operation Billy Durant used to launch GM, so in a real sense Flint’s car industry both began and peaked on this patch of land.

The end came fast once it started. GM announced the closing in 1997, and the last vehicle rolled off the Buick City line on June 29, 1999. Demolition crews took the buildings down between 2001 and 2003, leaving acres of bare concrete and contaminated soil. Decades of foundry work had left the ground laced with petroleum, chemicals, and metals, and the federal EPA has overseen a long cleanup ever since. After GM’s bankruptcy, the site landed with a trust set up specifically to clean and resell old auto properties.

The story isn’t only ruin, though. In June 2023, state and GM officials broke ground on a $300 million redevelopment — the Flint Commerce Center — meant to put new industry back on the same dirt.

It’s a strange thing to picture. Where 28,000 people once built cars in the biggest GM complex on the planet, there’s mostly grass and gravel now, slowly being readied to make something again.