No this was a plastic molding company ~10yr ago.

Edit:

They had a facility with a rail siding. Cheaper to relocate to a new site with expansion potential in another state than pay the state a million bucks an acre to let them fill in wetland (a ~100yo mill pond). The city did what they could to facilitate things but it basically just came down to the discretion of the state officials who live a few hundred miles away amongst all sort of moneyed tech and medical and finance industry and don't really see any upside to economic development in the poor end of the state, especially manufacturing. We're just a line item on the welfare bill as far are they care.

The real cherry on top is that the wetland went away "naturally" as the result of a low head dam removal a few years ago, at the behest of the same agency that said you can't fill in any of the mill pond.

The site is still vacant. It got sold to a REIT that's headquartered a couple blocks from the statehouse and environmental agency. Supposedly Waste Management or Republic Services wants to buy the old site now for it's rail siding and development potential.

>Did that happen?

I chose 7-mile for my hypothetical example because the road is an absolute goldmine for "you can't do that these days it's too dense" site plans and there's at least one liquor store with a dirt lot on it but I don't recall where. The "we want to make it nicer but it's not worth the stormwater treatment cost" example is from a business down the street from me. These things get stopped at the engineer/lawyer phase when the true costs become known to the owner.

Basically all the stormwater rules BS come at the expense of incentivizing sprawl. Doesn't really matter if you're walking past 1000ft of strip mall or 500ft of fancy multi level retail with a parking garage in back with 250ft of empty grass on either side, you're still 1000ft from the bus stop.

These same types of evil people exist in droves on the right too. They just circle jerk about different topics and peddle different forms of progressivism (lowercase P!!). Right now the establishment is somewhat catering to them, much to the chagrin of the useful idiots who are all in on the other team. They were the ones screeching all throughout the last administration.

At the end of the day has very little to do with MAGA(TM) or Liberals(TM). They're just the current characters in a script that's been played a bunch of times. Kinda like how you can set the basic plot of Romeo and Juliet in any century. From the Tea Party to the Ron Paul thing to the Bernie bros to MAGA the populist movements will keep arising so long as the "we know what's best we're so smart" crowd continues to do things at the expense of the average person. Whether that's back handed environmentalism or facilitating monopolistic big business (or both, for these two examples often go hand in hand) doesn't really matter. The average person doesn't like it even if they can't quite articulate why. And so the populists will keep coming, until one day one shows up that the system can't de-fang. Who knows what'll happen then but I'd bet a lot of money we won't get a stronger EPA or a more favorable environment for big business out of it.