Detroit’s Ravaged Packard Plant Looks to Europe for Renaissance

Detroit’s biggest ruin, the 40-acre Packard auto plant, will begin a European-inspired rebirth this summer under a plan that officials hope will revitalize one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods and symbolize a reversal of 50 years of economic decline.

Fernando Palazuelo, a Spanish developer based in Peru, seeks to raise as much as $500 million to turn the former factory into a commercial, art and residential magnet. Palazuelo, 60, who bought the mammoth eyesore for $405,000 at a tax sale in December 2013, has hired Albert Kahn Associates Inc., the same Detroit architecture firm that designed the 3.5 million-square-foot plant in 1903.