Photo by Violet Ikonomova.
Anyone who lives in the many neighborhoods around the city can attest to the severity of the abandoned, blighted home problem. But what makes matters even more troublesome is that it's far worse than the city concedes.
Violet Ikonomova, who joined Deadline Detroit this week, has an in-depth report in her final cover story at Metro Times:
A blighted home in Detroit.
A Metro Times investigation into the Land Bank's understanding of the scope of abandonment in the city suggests the agency has grossly underestimated the problem, raising concerns about just how much blight is left to tackle as the city taps into its final allotment of federal demolition dollars. Based on a nine-month survey of more than 400 randomly selected vacant houses classified by the Land Bank as "unlikely to be blighted," the city could be dealing with about 40 percent more abandoned houses than it believes.
Lending credence to the notion is a discovery by another group that has been visiting Detroit's vacant houses. According to Crystal Perkins, the city official spearheading an effort to board almost all of the city's empty houses with blown-out windows or doors, crews will have to seal an estimated total 30,000 houses — 19,000 more than initially advertised.
The vast discrepancy between the Land Bank's assessment and the reality on the ground is largely the result of inadequate data. No wide-scale property survey has been conducted in the five years since the Land Bank's $260 million demolition program began, and no survey is planned for the future. Instead, the Land Bank is measuring abandonment with an apparently flawed data calculation developed in-house. As a result, there may be no way to truly know if the city and its wrecking crews have gained the upper hand on blight — or if they're merely playing a losing game of catch-up as vacant properties deteriorate and multiply. And without that information, the city can't know what additional resources may be needed to address the problem.
