In a city filled with blight, one Detroit neighborhood gets help while another waits

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Gray Carter and Sherrod Hicks live a few blocks apart in the Brightmoor neighborhood on Detroit's far west side. They like where they live, but they both see a need for the city to tear down more abandoned homes to make their areas safer and better looking.


Carter is going to be disappointed, at least for a while. He lives in a 1 ½-story home on Lyndon, near Chapel, in a district that is not targeted for additional demolitions by the city in the foreseeable future.


In contrast, Hicks, who operates an adult foster home for seven clients on the west side of Outer Drive, at Acacia, has watched as heavy machinery has ripped down a handful of abandoned homes in recent weeks. In the six or so blocks west of Hicks, the city has demolished or is planning to knock down about 30 homes.


In Carter's neighborhood, just two blocks east: Zero.

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http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/in..._blight_o.html

Map: http://bridgemi.com/2015/03/detroit-demo-trial/

Looking at the map not surprising where they're doing the most work areas of the city with still solid neighborhoods Northwest Detroit, East English Village, etc

Limited funds.

I can see the city is doing a great job of demolishing its abandon buildings. But give it some time. Detroit's ghetto hoods won't be better in a week. It's going to take years and years. For those folks who are living their blight hoods, quit whining and wait. Progress is coming soon.

Clap your hands for Duggan! Detroiters voted for him to be your mayor and he is not a KWAME pimp playa!

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Originally Posted by RickBeall

Limited funds.

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Yep, and 127 sq. mi.

Brightmoor is mostly wiped-out by demolition, anyway.

The City seems to be codifying its demolition policy [[sending Pulte packing was part of this, I think), and the policy seems to be: do swift surgery on our functioning limbs. Even better, I think the policy is to preserve that which is salvageable and only remove the real cancers. Given the amount of demo already seen and the fact that emptiness cures nothing, this is a proper policy.

Not wise to be critical based on one person's story.

There are lots of reasons why demolitions might be done in clusters. The most obvious one is that if you want to reduce the cost and increase the volume of demolitions, you should do them in clusters. The cluster needs to be large enough so that your overhead costs is spread over several dozen homes. Do you know how much it costs to move heavy machinery around? I don't, but I know that its not trivial. So if you can, move it once and then drive it to do as many homes as you can in the same area. Same thing for every other step involved. For example, there's some job supervision. Somebody going around making sure things are being done right, identifying the homes, inspecting the results, coordinating the hauling, etc. Better for that person to drive 1 block to the next job, rather than 13 miles.

Or we can add 'demolition inequality' to 'income inequality' and pass some laws to make sure that demolition is done fairly and equitably.