File this under common sense:
The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force recently released its report documenting more than 40,000 blighted structures in the city.
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Unfortunately, although a tumor can be removed, blight is an ongoing process that will continue even if all its visible symptoms are temporarily eradicated. The hard truth is that even if we somehow erased, instantaneously, all blight in Detroit tomorrow, a year from now, we would have thousands of newly blighted structures littering the city.
Blight in Detroit is fundamentally the result of processes at work outside of the city’s boundaries. Since 1950, two-thirds of the city’s population has systematically been siphoned off by the region’s housing “disassembly line.” In the tri-county metro area, developers have in every decade since 1950 built many more dwellings — an average of more than 10,000 per year — than the net growth in households required. Developers figured that their new suburban subdivisions could successfully compete against the older housing stock. They were right. As households filled these new dwellings they vacated their previous homes, which other households decided to occupy because they were viewed as superior options to where they were previously living.
As this sequential moving up-and-out process continued, it inevitably vacated the oldest, least-competitive dwellings located in the least-desirable neighborhoods in the region. These places were overwhelmingly located in Detroit. Owners of these perpetually vacant properties could find neither tenants nor buyers. Thus they ceased paying property taxes or maintaining the structures and, eventually, abandoned them. Detroit’s blight is thus fundamentally a symptom of a speculative, uncontrolled residential development process in the suburbs.
To cure Detroit’s blight, Michigan must establish a metropolitan growth boundary, which would prohibit, for a specified period, new development outside of the existing urbanized footprint.
http://www.freep.com/article/2014060...Detroit-blight
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