Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan

The Obama administration put together a task force last September to explore how Detroit, the largest municipality to ever declare bankruptcy, might remake itself. The result, Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan, was revealed yesterday. Monica Davey summarizes the report's findings in her story, "Detroit Urged to Tear Down 40,000 Buildings":

The blight study, which is perhaps the most elaborate survey of decay conducted in any large America city, found that 30 percent of buildings, or 78,506 of them, scattered across the city’s 139 square miles, are dilapidated or heading that way. It found that 114,000 parcels — about 30 percent of the city’s total — are vacant. And it found that more than 90 percent of publicly held parcels are blighted. 

All in all, the report provides a remarkably gloomy, block-by-block portrait of the hollowed-out city’s misery and a virtual record of how Detroit’s population, once 1.8 million, has fallen to fewer than half that.

The task force strategy for dealing with Detroit's blight epidemic is demolition. The red in the map below, which appears as a sidebar to the story online, marks a property recommended for demolition.

The price tag for the demolition plan is $850 million. The city has plans to fund $450 million, much of which is contingent upon the bankruptcy process currently underway in federal court; but it is still short $400 million. Bear this in mind as we relaunch the Cold War, stationing troops in former Warsaw Pact countries (not to mention the pivots to Asia and Africa). Then there is the question what to do with all the open space that comes from spending close to $1 billion on demolition:

One question the blight task force report did not answer was what should become of the more than 100,000 empty lots that exist now and the many more that will be left behind with more demolitions. 

For years, some here have contemplated consolidating some of the city’s neighborhoods to allow the city to provide services to a smaller area, more suited to its shrunken population. But the report — named, in part, “Every Neighborhood Has a Future” — takes no stand on the notion of shrinking the city’s footprint.

There are some interesting reader comments attached to Davey's story, like this one from pintoks:

I would like the article to have better addressed the ownership of the abandoned properties. If a house goes into foreclosure, and reverts to the bank, and the bank chooses to not maintain the property, why mustn't the bank pay for the demolition or repairs? Same with abandoned industry: Some entity must hold title and as a result at least some modicum of liability for the condition of the buildings and be required to repair or demolish as required by code...

Or this from Deus02:

As someone who travelled for business to the area frequently from the late sixties going forward, this deterioration was in the making then starting from the riots and the burnings of a much of the city. Symbolically, I suppose, the movement of Motown to California shortly after was the start.

The question has to be asked, is, even when all the abandoned buildings are eliminated, what is the final endgame here? Detroit has always been essentially a one industry town whose time had come but who is going to provide the jobs and do the things necessary to revitalize the city? Where are the plans?

In all my years of travelling back and forth and talking to the local business contacts(the majority of whom lived in the suburbs), frankly, I always got the impression as long as they felt safe, many in their gated communities, they couldn't care less about what happened in the city.

And this one from Dredpiraterobts:

The question is, what are you going to do with all those cooked materials?

40,000 houses equals how much lumber? How many ornate doorways? How much glass? How much "Artisanal" antique, blown, imperfect, uniquely wavy ,thick glass windows? And you're going to just crush then with a backhoe?

The foundation (if you will) of a strong economy is the building and construction trades. It puts many hands to work a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. Is Detroit so overemployed that they can't hire hands to demolish these buildings and truck the usable lumber to an abandoned shell that was once a factory for cleaning, storage, restoration and distribution to construction sights or Re-Stores across the nation and the world? Oh, and if that generates some profit, then that's a good thing too isn't it.

Obviously, not every board foot is worth saving, but then it's worth pulping, or it's worth composting.

Look, you can spend $20M on Cat heavy equipment, and if time were of the essence (as it is when you're building) it might make sense to. Or you can spend $20M on manual labor and instead of making solid, old growth beams into splinters you create an employment base. You create an ethos of preservation even in the reality of contraction.

Carbon footprint? Greenhouse gas? How many trees will be saved by reusing Detroit?

A lot of creative things could be done -- open up the plots to urban homesteaders and gardeners; let Occupy try its hand at a socially just reclamation project. There are so many opportunities for regeneration and growth. But with the process in the hands of corporate honchos and government elites, it is inevitable that any solution is going to be privatized, corrupt and providing the tiniest employment footprint as possible.

To the Gray Lady's credit, she has been providing regular coverage of Detroit's bankruptcy, as well as its struggle with post-industrial blight. I've been attempting to keep up with it. I think the story is a time-present encapsulation of U.S. decline. Detroit was the symbol of 20th century -- the American Century! -- U.S. prosperity. I rode the train home one night with a Detroit resident who was visiting Seattle. He was going into downtown to see the sights. I asked him about all the stories of decline, but he didn't seem to think much of them. He was a guy my age who obviously had a good job; he said he like to ride his bike; he looked fit. For him, Detroit was home. And from what I could pick up from him, the blight had been there for a longtime (as Deus02 mentioned, at least since the riots and fires of the late 1960s, and probably earlier), and he was used to it.