60 Minutes Piece on Cleveland Ohio Razing of Homes

[Dexlin]

I saw the show. Detroit was tearing down close to 4000 houses a year since shortly after Kwame took over as Mayor. It costs about $4,000 to tear down and correctly clean up a vacant house site, In Detroit there are so many housing units going vacant the city has no hope of keeping up.

Detroit lost almost 300,000 people in the last 10 years, If you figure 2.5 people per housing unit, That's around 12,000 units a year that need to be demolished. At $4000 per demo It's going to cost you $48Million a year to keep up.

Just a correction. The Detroit News reported back in November of last year that the five previous years only saw about 5,000 home demolitions total. Both Archer and Kilpatrick had huge goals, and it even got up to the point where thousands upon thousands of permits were actually issues, but the city never had the money to keep up with the goals. In another story by the New's Laura Berman, last year, that since 1999, the city had knocked down 12,640 homes, the vasty majority during Archer's administrations. The city was averaging 500 to 700 demolitions a year during Kilpatrick's administration. The number actually only takes in city demolitions, which leaves demolitions for other entities like Blight Busters, private demolitions, county demolitions, etc...

One more slight correction. You rounded up way too high the number of people Detroit lost over the decade. It wasn't even 250,000 let alone rounding it up to 300,000.

[Roadmaster49]

So WHO owns the now vacant lots in Detroit? Can a homeowner next to one buy it from the city for a fair price or are they just sitting there empty and owned by the city with no plan for sale?