I am not sure if this will work in a crime ridden de-populated city, with large swaths of empty land where most everything has been torn down, the better to thwart the crack dealers, but good luck!
A big part of the cost of the Big Dig was mitigation to property owners. It must be nice to do a public works project where the bill for property taking is in the thousands and you're displacing no traffic to speak of.
It sounds like a homeowner bailout, since the homes are now close to worthless. I wonder whether market price was paid for the homes, or something higher that was well, more "fair."
Why would property need to be expropriated at all for a light-rail line? The article doesn't mention this, and there aren't buildings in the middle of the street.
It doesn't seem like there would. And the traffic disruption is minimal in a city like Detroit where everyone who drives a car in the city doesn't live there and only uses the highways to commute in. (Highways, ironically, were the cause of Detroit's demise.)
Anyway, I hope this works. But I doubt it will. There's almost no residential development along Woodward Ave to speak of; it's all been torn down to try to "save" the business district. So, while the business district will be well-connected to itself, it will remain unconnected to anywhere where actual people live except by car. (This includes poor Detroiters, who live far away from the business district because they've been pushed away by urban renewal programs.) None of the scared suburbanites from Grosse Pointe or Farmington Hills will drive into Detroit just to take public transportation.
