Detroit fights blight by selling vacant homes

Associated Press

DETROIT

Anthony Brown keeps his home of 36 years in good shape, but it is an island of tranquillity in a sea of blight in Detroit’s Marygrove neighborhood. There is a vacant house next door, another across the street and still others farther down Wisconsin Street.

“It was beautiful around here,” Brown, a 59-year-old Ford Motor Co. worker, said about how things once looked. “Everybody was in the houses. Everybody kept their lawns up. Everybody was planting flowers.”

Now he and others in bankrupt Detroit see signs of hope in an aggressive home-preservation plan that Mayor Mike Duggan is using to lure people back into city neighborhoods. It’s no small task: A recent study recommended razing more than 38,000 houses. An additional 35,000 are unoccupied, abandoned or government-owned and at risk of becoming blighted. About 5,500 of those are owned by the city or the Detroit Land Bank Authority.

Instead of razing them all, the city is highlighting the ones that can be saved and selling them at auction to individuals and families who want to fix them and move in. That strategy, if successful, is expected to help eradicate blight and strengthen neighborhoods that are stable or on-the-edge.

The Land Bank began auctioning off one home per day in early May. That has been expanded to two per day and soon will grow to three.

About 50 have been sold, so far, and 6,500 bidders have registered on the online auction site.

“We’ve sold $700,000 worth of houses,” Duggan told The Associated Press last week. “We’re going strong to weak. We’re starting in the strongest neighborhoods in this city and going after every single abandoned house.

“If you’ve got four abandoned houses on a block and you demo one house, you haven’t changed the quality of life for people on that block. If you try to sell one house where there are three abandoned, nobody’s going to buy. When you take the entire neighborhood at once and attack every single abandoned house, that’s when people are willing to invest.”

The highest winning auction bid has been $135,000 for a four-bedroom, three-bath historic home in the Boston-Edison area near the city’s center. Activity was so furious that the website crashed near the end of the auction.