 |
In many Detroit neighborhoods, run down houses stand next to abandoned
buildings and empty lots-- like "Berlin after the war," in the
words of one resident.
(Photo by Bruce Giffin)
| With thousands of abandoned houses blighting Detroit, the mayor
looks for salvation in mass demolition. by Alyssa Katz It's a common sight: a large parcel of land with a few houses scattered around as if they fell to Earth like Tetris pieces and stayed wherever they landed. For many, this vista conjures up a string of associations--money, mobility, sport-utility vehicles, subdivisions. In Detroit, the city that made such a suburban landscape possible, the view tells a different story. Once as densely filled with homes as any thriving metropolis, Detroit has lost tens of thousands of residences over the last 40 years in a grim spiral of middle-class flight, disinvestment, and abandonment, leaving entire blocks virtually barren. Even in neighborhoods that have remained stable, boarded-up and burned-out buildings are as much a part of the scenery as lampposts and fire hydrants. Today, Mayor Dennis Archer is promising that abandoned houses will cease to be the icons of his city--by the end of this year, those blighted structures should yield to weedy fields. A week before his reelection last year, the mayor welcomed top officials of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as they made his city their "headquarters for a day." Secretary Andrew Cuomo granted Archer a campaign wish: a $60 million loan guarantee, slated to finance the demolition of nearly every abandoned residential building in Detroit. According to HUD, it will be the largest such bulldozing ever undertaken by a U.S. city. Exactly how big, even municipal officials weren't sure. Prepared with only a guesstimate of between 8,000 and 10,000 derelict structures, survey teams fanned out last February to do the first-ever official census of Detroit abandonment. When the inventory is completed, city agencies, the city council, and community groups will be coordinating the logistics of condemnation and demolition, figuring out how to regear a system that currently brings down just 1,000 to 2,000 houses a year. In a gesture every Detroiter can appreciate, Archer wants the demolition completed by the end of October, before another Devil's Night takes its toll. Since the early 1980s, the night before Halloween has seen an epidemic of arson, targeted mostly at vacant buildings; hundreds of houses and apartments have succumbed to the torch. Under Archer, who succeeded the late and legendary Coleman Young in 1994, Devil's Night has been renamed Angel's Night, and a combination of neighborhood patrols and a curfew has reduced the number of fires. But one night of community goodwill can't undo the history that has gotten Detroit into the shape it's in. Since the 1950s, the city has lost half its population to a host of plagues, from the 1967 riot that sent white flight into overdrive to federal subsidies for suburban home-building. By 1980, the decline of the American auto industry had killed most of the factory jobs that sustained the city. (Now home to just over a million people, a third of them below the poverty line, Detroit lives in fear of the 2000 census--if, as expected, the population gets any smaller, the city will be forced to cut income tax rates in half.) With the exodus and economic downturn came the beginning of the end for much of Detroit's housing: property values plunged so low that many homeowners couldn't borrow enough money to cover basic repairs; in addition, lending discrimination against the city's majority African American residents was rampant. Many owners simply drove away from their properties, with the cover of Devil's Night providing an opportunity to pick up insurance money on the way out. Others became absentee landlords for people who couldn't afford anything else. On the East Side, it can be hard to tell occupied homes from abandoned ones--tenants have installed plywood windows and scrap-metal roof patches to keep their houses livable. The buildings targeted by the mayor's plan are in all parts of the city. Particularly hard-hit have been the neighborhood standard-issues: four-square houses and bungalows that are no longer in demand. "We're a city that reveres the new," says downtown-based planning consultant Ernest Zachary. "In Detroit, people [are always] aiming to move to a brand-new house." In an industrial city snubbed by the global economy, though, new housing doesn't sprout readily--most of the land that will be cleared is not slated for development. "There's a 'Tear it down and they will come' mentality," says Katherine Clarkson, executive director of the advocacy group Preservation Wayne. "No one wants to invest in an area filled with abandoned homes. But we don't have guaranteed investors who'll build once they're gone." At least by Detroit standards, the city has been seeing a housing boom, fueled by cheap property, an underutilized infrastructure, and an increasing scarcity of land in the suburbs. Yet developers are stymied, they say, by a city bureaucracy that doesn't even know who owns what--stories abound of buyers securing title to a property after arduous research, only to discover that the city had also cleared its sale to a second owner. In one case, a Victorian awaiting renovation was demolished after the city apparently confused its address with that of a property down the street. (The Planning and Development Department is working to computerize its records.) But, for once, in this demolition proj-ect Detroit is turning investor-friendly. Houses that could be renovated will instead be demolished, clearing large parcels for new construction. "Inspectors are going to be deciding whether a building is in an area where it makes sense to invest in rehabilitation," says Joseph Vassallo, interim director of planning and development. "If there are no other houses around, it will be torn down. But if it's in a stable area, we will try to subsidize renovation." To that end, the city has teamed up with the federal mortgage agency Fannie Mae, which has pledged to make $400 million in loans to low- and middle-income buyers. Hopes are high that new development will look nothing like the East Side's much-loathed Victoria Park, a suburban-style gated community built after financiers refused to pay for anything else. In pursuit of continuity with the Detroit that came before, one condo development, the 572-unit Woodward Place at Brush Park, was designed to look consistent with the manses that once filled this neighborhood. Only about 100 of Brush Park's original Victorians survive, and only a quarter of these are occupied; the rest are in various states of abandonment, and some will surely come down . Even preservation-minded Detroiters concede that there are few alternatives. "We had to push to tear down a building across the street from my house," recalls Anne Neumann-Myers, president of the Historic Brush Park Homeowners Association. "It hurt, but it needed to be done. It looked like Berlin after the war." Any new construction, she adds, even on virtually empty blocks, will have to adhere to detailed historic district guidelines. "It's tough, but we think that if we do it right this one time we can put a stop to abandonment," says Greg Bowens, a spokesman for the mayor. "The next two years are make-or-break for us. If we can save houses we will. At this point we're just praying that we can stabilize neighborhoods. The old strategies just didn't work." In a sign of the administration's desperation, it turns out that the HUD loan it requested with such fanfare was unnecessarily expensive; the agency later came up with an interest-free grant. For more mundane reasons, Mayor Archer may miss his demolition deadline. The city, which by law must award half of all its contracts to Detroit-based businesses, is expected to have trouble finding enough construction companies to do the job. |
Keywords:
demolition, Detroit, neighborhoods, vacant lots
