The Silverdome cost $55.7M to build and sold for $583,000 — 1% of its price

The Pontiac Silverdome opened in 1975 as a 80,000-seat domed stadium built on more than $55 million in public bond financing, one of the largest venues of its kind in the United States. It was a single-purpose bet: a stadium asking one anchor tenant, the Detroit Lions, to justify its cost.

The dependence was total. From 1975 the stadium hosted the Lions, and the moment the team left for downtown Detroit in 2001 the venue's value collapsed. By 2006 the Silverdome sat empty, and the city of Pontiac — its owner and the party that had borrowed for it — was left holding a stadium with no tenant and no obvious buyer.

The city tried to sell. In November 2009 an auction turned the near-worthless asset over to Triple Investment Group, a Toronto-based firm led by Andreas Apostolopoulos, for $583,000 — roughly 1 percent of what it had cost to build more than three decades earlier. The buyer never developed the 127-acre site, and the city later sued Triple over the property's condition.

The final act was demolition. An implosion was attempted on 3 December 2017, and the dome — a monument to a single-tenant public gamble — was pulled down. The $55.7 million civic investment had ended as a $583,000 sale and a pile of rubble.