George Galster, an economist who is a professor of urban affairs at Wayne State University and the author of "Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City," writes in the Free Press if officials are truly interested in stopping the spread of blight in the city, they would prohibit new development outside of the existing urbanized footprint.
In other words, put a halt to sprawl.
He writes:
Blight in Detroit is fundamentally the result of processes at work outside of the city’s boundaries. Since 1950, two-thirds of the city’s population has systematically been siphoned off by the region’s housing “disassembly line.” In the tri-county metro area, developers have in every decade since 1950 built many more dwellings — an average of more than 10,000 per year — than the net growth in households required. Developers figured that their new suburban subdivisions could successfully compete against the older housing stock. They were right. As households filled these new dwellings they vacated their previous homes, which other households decided to occupy because they were viewed as superior options to where they were previously living.
As this sequential moving up-and-out process continued, it inevitably vacated the oldest, least-competitive dwellings located in the least-desirable neighborhoods in the region. These places were overwhelmingly located in Detroit. Owners of these perpetually vacant properties could find neither tenants nor buyers. Thus they ceased paying property taxes or maintaining the structures and, eventually, abandoned them. Detroit’s blight is thus fundamentally a symptom of a speculative, uncontrolled residential development process in the suburbs.
