$150 Mil from Feds for Blight Removal. Roy Roberts Named 'Blight Czar'

[professorscott]

Be vigilant about collecting unpaid fines from absentee/delinquent property owners; be lenient towards owner-occupied housing.

Most of what you posted was good but this makes me wonder where you are getting a hold of LSD in this day and age. How exactly do you propose to force people to give you money on property that isn't worth anything? The structural problem Detroit has is that it is trying to tax property that has zero or negative value.

So I walk away from a property, now you have one more piece of land you can't do anything with. Your move. Now what do you do?

[gvidas]

The walk-aways are already addressed by the system: in 3 years, Wayne County will flip it. I don't think it would be ethical to make foreclosure happen any faster, or to make demo happen faster than foreclosure.

I'm more concerned with the speculators whose strategy is to sit on their Golden Tickets until they can cash them in, regardless of how much they fall apart in the mean time. My impression is that most of the walking-away has already been done, and now the lion's share of that property is owned by the banks, the city/county/state, or a handful of private real estate speculators.

I'm thinking mostly of the buildings which -are- worth something, or are on land which certainly is, like 3550 Cass: as soon as it starts to freeze, that building is going to start dropping the other half of its face brick onto a heavily-used bus stop. Or the Wurlitzer, which racked up tens of thousands of dollars in fines, but all of them were only ever taped to the front door, as though that constituted diligence in pursuing the owners.

Maybe it's not LSD so much as just naiveté that leads me to think that if a $130 utility bill will get sent to collections, maybe $30000 in unpaid fines on an imminently hazardous building should, too. At least, I would hope there is a legal avenue for seeking damages. Maybe in severe cases blight fines could be added to the property's taxes, so you have to pay them to hold onto the property.

Regardless of whether any blood will ever be squeezed from these stones, it seems completely counter-productive to instead demolish said speculated building at the public's expense, leaving the delinquent owner with a freshly prepared vacant lot to speculate. At the very least, the land should be confiscated after demo.

[WaCoTS]

“When that blight is gone, maybe we don’t have to be talking about shrinking cities because it will be such a rush of people who want to get into low-value housing — when all the utilities are there and the land is pretty much close to free— not exactly free, but close to it — and all the utilities are there, it becomes very cheap for a builder/developer to develop a residential unit, and they are going to develop them and develop them in mass as soon as we get the structures down and maybe we don’t have to worry about raising peas or corn or whatever it is you do in the farm.”

he's just talking out his ass to make good press. it's not as cut & dry a picture as he paints. the "utilities" may "already be there", etc, but that doesnt mean theyre in usable shape. and i doubt a few blighted houses are all that's standing in the way of any "rush of people" moving into Detroit like he's talking about. even if you COULD legally tear down every unoccupied house.

but yeah, i dont think private profiteers should be in a position to hold the public trust on their own.

[preserve]

Driving into Detroit on Michigan Ave from Dearborn....very depressing...all that
stupid graffiti, used to only be on empty buildings, now these artists feel they can deface anything. I hope when the demolition orders come in, they'll know which of the defaced properties are actually dangerous and need to be torn down. If I had the money, I'd hire a goon squad to patrol at night and spray paint the vandals.

[Hermod]

Driving into Detroit on Michigan Ave from Dearborn....very depressing...all that
stupid graffiti, used to only be on empty buildings, now these artists feel they can deface anything. I hope when the demolition orders come in, they'll know which of the defaced properties are actually dangerous and need to be torn down. If I had the money, I'd hire a goon squad to patrol at night and spray paint the vandals.

Tonight I was at the railroad museum anbd they were showing a movie made about the New York Central in the Detroit area in the 1961-1963 timeframe. All of these freight trains coming out of the city had some freight cars in bad shape, but not one bit of graffiti on any of them.