Battling Blight in Detroit

"Battling Blight in Detroit - A new private-public partnership succeeds where government has failed."

By Jillian Kay Melchior


This article tells the story behind Detroit’s Blight Authority, a new private-public partnership founded on free-market principles and led by retired lieutenant colonel James H. Henderson, who managed resupply missions for the Iraq War in 2004.

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“I don’t know if government and government administrations are designed to solve problems,” Henderson says. “I think they’re designed to administer regulations and keep the status quo. . . . But an undertaking of this magnitude will always overwhelm a city. That’s why we have [a philanthropic sector] that will come in and assist.”

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Click here to begin reading the article.

Good article. And it sheds more light on how the Detroit Blight Authority came to be. Initially, when the project was shrouded in secrecy, I was a skeptic. But I'm beginning to admire Bill Pulte for getting his family behind this. And, at 24 years of age, it shows that age doesn't matter when it comes to making a significant difference in the D. That he and his 81 year old grandfather [[and founder of Pulte Homes in Detroit in 1950), jointly lobbied Bing to make this happen, is also noteworthy.

I got another warm fuzzy by reading how the son of Walter Harris, the firefighter that lost his life in a burning abandoned building in 2008, is one of the principals behind this, motivated in part, to make this a memorial to his dad.

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“We knocked down ten blocks in ten days, the fastest it’s ever been done,” Pulte says. “We did it for half the cost [of government blight-removal efforts]. . . . If we applied the types of principles the government has applied, we’d be broke.” He’s determined to apply free-market principles to demolition efforts, “solving this as a businessman would.”

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And, rather than using the city’s unwieldy data systems, the Blight Authority is working directly with DTE Energy to contact the last resident on file, then reaching out to the property owner to obtain permission to wreck the building. Owners stand to benefit because they retain all property rights and get the undesirable building torn down for free.

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Finally, where previous efforts took the waste material from a demolition to the landfill 40 to 80 miles away — another expense — the Blight Authority recycles around 80 percent of the rubble.

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Good work!