The Equity Factor

Detroit Blight Task Force Must Overcome Mountains of Paperwork, Squatters and Dirt

From red tape to a possible shortage of dirt, Detroit’s task force faces all sorts of obstacles.

Credit: AP Photo/David Runk

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How do you fill up the hole left after an abandoned building comes down? And what happens if you need to raze a dangerous townhouse occupied by squatters? These are among the questions facing Detroit’s Blight Task Force as it sorts out how to clear 80,000 blighted structures in six years.

Last October the city announced a new task force to focus on blight in a town that’s become something of a poster child for ruin porn. Sitting on the task force is billionaire Dan Gilbert, who has poured millions into Detroit’s central business district, and Roy Roberts, former emergency manager of Detroit Public Schools. Last month, Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr — that is, the city’s emergency manager, appointed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder in March 2013 — proposed spending $520 million over six years to clean up blight.

But you can’t just show up with a bulldozer. “Perhaps the most challenging obstacle, demolition experts agree, is the time-sapping bureaucratic paperwork required for each and every blighted structure before wrecking crews can move in,” John Gallgher wrote in the Detroit Free Press this weekend. That means shutting off gas and electric lines, notifying absentee landlords of the demolition and, in some cases, removing asbestos.

Then you have potential squatters, who are often found in structures on the city’s demolition list. John Adamo Jr., CEO of Detroit-based demolition outfit Adamo Group, told the Free Press that his company estimates between 5 and 10 percent of buildings on the demo list have squatters.

One of the biggest issues to tackle, other than the mountains of paperwork, is something you might think is readily available: dirt. Typically, the city will use dirt from highway construction jobs to fill the basements of razed homes. But when the city ratchets up the demolition process — some say the rate of demos could increase by 400 percent — it will need a lot more dirt. And if dirt isn’t readily available or in short supply, the city may have to use sand, which can cost 12 to 15 times more than dirt. (No, sand and dirt aren’t free.)

For everyone out there who says, “just raze Detroit and start from scratch,” this is a friendly reminder that you can’t run around a city knocking down vacant buildings like Godzilla on a warpath. It takes time, money and planning to do this right.

The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Bill Bradley is a writer and reporter living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Deadspin, GQ, and Vanity Fair, among others.

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Tags: infrastructuredetroitequity factorblightpublic safetydan gilbert

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