Jennifer Mergos (Facebook photo)
Residents normally don't want house squatters nearby.
But that's not the case around Puritan and Hazelton in the Brightmoor area of northwest Detroit.
Neighbors are so desperate to stop a cycle of abandonment and blight they’re recruiting a squatter to occupy a home whose longtime owners left last weekend, Joel Kurth of the Detroit News writes.
Neighbors fear the onetime farmhouse on Puritan and Hazelton will be stripped and torched if it remains empty for long. Eight nearby houses burned in the past two years. A few blocks away, there are more weedy lots than homes.
“We want squatters. There’s so much abandonment here, we need them to turn the neighborhood around,” said Jennifer Mergos, 33, co-founder of the Northwest Brightmoor Renaissance neighborhood group.
