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In Detroit, Every Neighborhood Has a Future...And It Doesn't Include Blight

Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Shares Plan to Eliminate Blight in City


News provided by

Detroit Blight Removal Task Force

May 28, 2014, 09:45 ET

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DETROIT, May 28, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force ("Task Force") presented its plan and recommendations to eliminate blight in the city of Detroit on Tuesday before hundreds of residents and community leaders as well as Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and Emergency Financial Manager Kevyn Orr.

The plan, "Every Neighborhood Has a Future...And It Doesn't Include Blight," is based on eight months of research, data collection and analysis targeted to remove all blight within Detroit's 139 square mile geography. The plan was presented by Detroit Blight Removal Task Force chairpersons Dan Gilbert, founder and chairman of Rock Ventures and Quicken Loans Inc., Dr. Glenda Price, president of the Detroit Public Schools Foundation, and Linda Smith, executive director of U-SNAP-BAC.

Gilbert, Price and Smith provided an overview of their work, including a brief demonstration of the data tool enlisted to survey all 380,000 parcels in the city of Detroit, and summarized the Task Force's recommendations to remove blight in Detroit.  

Gilbert, who read from the report's chairperson introduction, said, "Just like removing only part of a malignant cancerous tumor is no real solution, removing only part or incremental amounts of blight from neighborhoods and the city as a whole is also no real solution. Because, like cancer, unless you remove the entire tumor, blight grows back."

Background

In September 2013, the Obama Administration convened the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force to develop a detailed implementation plan to remove every blighted structure and clear every blighted vacant lot in the City of Detroit as quickly as possible using an environmentally-conscious approach. The chairpersons led a team of experts from the city, state and federal government, public and private sectors and the foundation community to collect data and create a set of recommendations.

Process

The Task Force's first mission was to physically assess and quantify blight in the city. More than 150 Detroit residents were hired and trained to survey every real estate parcel in the City of Detroit between mid-December 2013 and late January 2014. Utilizing a recently developed technology called Motor City Mapping, created by Loveland Technologies and Data Driven Detroit, the teams photographed and documented the condition, occupancy and other factors visibly available on each structure and vacant lot in the city. Then 24 data sets from the local, state, federal, and private sector – such as utility connections, postal service data and foreclosure information – were added to the Motor City Mapping database. For the first time in Detroit's history, a deep and complete picture of each property in the city is now accessible for strategic, tactical analytics and decision making.

"Community participation and input was essential to our work," said Smith.  She noted that resident and community groups provided valuable feedback that impacted the Task Force's final blight removal recommendations.

The Task Force also set out to define blight by studying city and state descriptions, and identified "blight indicators," or parcel characteristics that would likely lead to a property becoming blighted in the near future. The Task Force defined blight as a parcel that exhibited any of the following characteristics:

  • a public nuisance;
  • an attractive nuisance;
  • fire damaged or otherwise dangerous;
  • have code violations posing a severe and immediate health or safety threat;
  • are open to the elements and to trespassing;
  • are already on the City's Buildings, Safety, Engineering, and Environmental Department (BSEED) Demolition list;
  • are owned or under the control of a land bank;
  • previously had utilities, plumbing, heating or sewerage disconnected, destroyed, removed, or rendered ineffective;
  • are a tax-reverted property;
  • have been vacant for five consecutive years;
  • or, have not been maintained to code.

Properties with "blight indicators" are those properties and structures which did not meet our definition of blight, yet had the following characteristics: were occupied and/or abandoned (regardless of duration), or were publicly owned by local or state authorities, or owned by Government Sponsored Entities (such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).  While a small number of these properties may appear in fair condition today, there is a high probability that they will become blighted in the near future and need to be removed. The Task Force recommends the approach of further inspection, data gathering and analysis to determine the appropriate intervention.

The team also set out to understand how blight had become such an overwhelming condition within the city's borders, and how it had been addressed in the past. The Task Force immersed itself in the various legal processes necessary to banish blight and identified the procedural barriers that have allowed blight to spread.  The Task Force also met with leading demolition and deconstruction experts to better understand those processes and estimate costs for future work. During the presentation, Price said through this specific research the Task Force identified several process, legal and funding recommendations to eliminate blight and equally important, to impede its further spread. "Once blight is removed all kinds of possibilities will exist," Price said.

Findings

The survey identified a total of 84,641 "neighborhood blight" parcels (defined as residential, small commercial structure and vacant lots only).  Among those, the Task Force recommends 40,077 structures and 6,135 vacant lots for immediate action, and further evaluation for an additional 38,429 structures that exhibited blight indicators.

Recommendation Highlights

Detroit Future City's land use policies and Mayor Duggan's 10-Point Plan provided the framework for the Task Force's recommendations to tackle the enormous mission to eliminate blight in Detroit.  The recommendations rely heavily on an approach to community engagement, supported by technology, that will continually gather insights into blight removal from residents and apply that information to shape the best possible interventions for all Detroiters. Recommendation highlights include:

  • Annual survey of all 380,000 parcels, conducted by the Detroit Land Bank Authority, utilizing Motor City Mapping. Future updates to the tool will allow the public to submit real-time information as conditions change in their neighborhoods, and will make the data accessible to residents as well as all municipal departments. A second phase of Motor City Mapping will soon be available, thanks to a recent $1 million investment by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. The new version, "People's Property Dashboard" will provide the public with a transparent view of all parcels in the city and enable residents to update neighborhood property information in real-time.
  • Support ongoing city efforts to strengthen codes, update ordinances and change laws that support a proactive approach to parcel intervention. In addition, the city should continue to take aggressive action to attain title and remove blight in abandoned and vacant properties by improving the hearing process and establishing a new demolition review board that would be dedicated to reviewing such requests.
  • Use the Strategic Assessment Triage Tool (SATT) that will help prioritize data from annual parcel survey and define neighborhoods where intervention will be most effective in the near term.
  • Removal recommendations for blighted neighborhood structures that are beyond opportunity to be stabilized or rehabilitated. Recommendations for environmental measures, deconstruction opportunities, demolition needs and recycling potential are provided. The Task Force recommends that the city establish two new construction and demolition recycling centers within the city limits, funded by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, in partnership with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, to add capacity for the influx of refuse from the deconstruction process.
  • Initiate a call to action to all Detroit stakeholders - businesses, churches and residents - to focus philanthropic funding and volunteer resource programming on clearing and maintaining vacant lots in the city. In addition, the city and Detroit Land Bank Authority should actively provide property owners the opportunity to purchase adjacent vacant lots at low cost.
  • Stay ahead of future blight by promoting property tax policy that encourages participation and addresses properties at risk of foreclosure. In turn, using and strengthening existing fines and penalties for blight offenders.
  • The City should maximize the impact of Plan of Adjustment funds by deploying them in ways that increase the potential for future revenue. This includes expanding the use of funds to rehabilitation in neighborhoods as well as for clearing residential, commercial, and vacant lots.

Timeline & Funding

The Blight Task Force projects a total cost of $850 million to remove all neighborhood blight in the City of Detroit.  To date, approximately $456 million in funding has been identified for blight removal, including $88 million which is accessible immediately. An additional $368 million is expected to be made available over the next five years through the "Plan of Adjustment," pending bankruptcy court approval.

"The great news is that before this plan is underway, more than half of the funds needed to eliminate neighborhood blight is in place," Gilbert said. "These funds provide a meaningful runway to start this blight removal work. I am confident that as residents, stakeholders and others see the progress, more funding will naturally be committed because it will be clear that the return on investment will be more than significant," he said.

The Task Force believes that all blight in Detroit can be removed in five years or less, and acknowledged that this timeline will require additional funding, tremendous coordination and partnerships among residents, as well as the public, private and philanthropic sectors.

SOURCE Detroit Blight Removal Task Force

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