Ever heard of feral homes? Above is a picture capturing what is happening to an estimated 33,500 abandoned homess in Detroit. Two years ago I posted a map of the foreclosure situation in Detroit – colorful but not pretty. Over the last few years I have heard about how bad it is from a house that took 3 weeks to sell for $19 to the average home selling for less than a car built in Detroit.
There has been hope of turning Detroit into an artist’s utopia. With homes abandoned and in different states of disrepair, they have sold for $19, $500, and even $1,900 giving starving artists a place to live. Many of the homes have been stripped of wiring and anything else not bonded to the earth. The homes become a canvas of sort to play with in design and green technologies.
A interesting idea has popped up; a somewhat counter-intuitive idea. What if they shrunk the city?
The city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural.
Now, a city of nearly 2 million in the 1950s has declined to less than half that number. On some blocks, only one or two occupied houses remain, surrounded by trash-strewn lots and vacant, burned-out homes. Scavengers have stripped anything of value from empty buildings. According to one recent estimate, Detroit has 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots.
Several other declining industrial cities, such as Youngstown, Ohio, have also accepted downsizing. Since 2005, Youngstown has been tearing down a few hundred houses a year. But Detroit’s plans dwarf that effort.
It makes sense. Rudy Giuliani who is credited for cleaning up New York said he couldn’t tackle Los Angeles because it is too spread out. Detroit has lost half of it’s population but still has to provide city services to the same area. If there was going to be a rush of young creatives it probably would have already happened.
I just remembered that a client called me three years ago and said they were going to buy a home in Detroit for $40,000. It’s so cheap. I said, “Well, it does seem cheap but it’s all relative. That may just be the price homes sell for there. And there isn’t a driving force for the economy to recover.” I hoped they wouldn’t buy but they did. It’s just gotten worse. I can only hope it comes back for their sake and all of the people living there.
