Detroit's new blight task force is about to start developing the most extensive property database of deteriorating or abandoned structures in city history, Christine Ferretti reports in The Detroit News.
The effort, coordinated by Data Driven Detroit, will begin by training survey teams that will begin parcel-by-parcel assessments in the city’s “hardest hit” areas, Erica Raleigh, acting director of Data Driven Detroit, told The News.
“It’s unprecedented,” Raleigh said. “We’re going to leave some incredible information for the city and ability to update that over time.”
The initiative marks the first major action by Detroit’s Blight Task Force, a three-member team created in September through a federal, state and city partnership.
The first six areas to be surveyed include the Jefferson-Chalmers, Morningside-East English Village and Grandmont-Rosedale neighborhoods, some north-end communities, and near Marygrove College and the University of Detroit Mercy.
The group remains in a “hunting and gathering mode,” task force member Glenda Price said, as it evaluates the city’s blight, removal priorities and potential legal obstacles. Task force members — Price, Quicken Loans founder and chairman Dan Gilbert and Linda Smith, executive director of east side nonprofit U-Snap-Bac — are expected to deliver their blight-fighting recommendations by year’s end to the city’s chief land officer, Roy Roberts.
Assessments of the city’s 390,000 structures will be conducted by 75 three-person teams. The teams will go into 23-square-mile “micro-hoods” averaging about 600 parcels, Raleigh told Ferretti.
The building-by-building survey actually is not totally unprecedented. In 1989, when abandoned homes and businesses were becoming a top issue in the mayoral campaign, the Free Press conducted a survey of every building in Detroit. The paper's methodology included two-person teams that fanned out across the city's 139 square miles.
According to the main story of that series:
Detroit is the home of 15,215 vacant buildings -- enough to house a small
city -- and nearly half of them stand open to children, vagrants, arsonists
and crackheads.A six-week Free Press survey of every city street found an infection more
pervasive than ever documented.Vacant structures, many of them abandoned, are found in nearly every
neighborhood and along every major thoroughfare. More than half the city's
2,300 streets lend their names to the address of at least one vacant building.There are abandoned stores, abandoned bowling alleys, abandoned churches,
abandoned schools and abandoned factories.But mostly, there are abandoned homes. The survey counted 9,017 vacant
single-family homes, cruel testimony to the two- decade exodus of middle-class
families that is both a cause and a result of the economic decay that has
crippled many Detroit neighborhoods.
The Free Press conducted the census to get an accurate measure of what Mayor Coleman Young had called "one of the most serious and pernicious problems to afflict some of our neighborhoods."
After he learned of the paper's results, the mayor said the city must slow down the pace of abandonment, adding, "We've got to get some more money" for demolition.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, Detroit is said to have 78,000 abandoned buildings, but the accuracy of that number is uncertain.
