Detroit’s Fight Against Blight Hampered by Red Tape

Demolishing Detroit’s blighted and dangerous buildings would cost an estimated $500 million in a city already $325 million in debt — and much of the blame can be laid squarely on red tape.

The situation in the Motor City is grim — and so is the landscape. More than 38,000 homes are listed on Detroit’s Dangerous Building inventory, and 80,000 addresses no longer receive mail.

The city’s population has plunged from 1.8 million in 1950 to just 706,000 in 2011, dropping 237,000 residents in the previous decade alone. More than half the owners of the city’s 305,000 properties reportedly failed to pay taxes in 2011.

Some property owners turn to arson to collect insurance payouts on their deserted buildings. Detroit has suffered between 11,000 and 12,000 fires each year for the past decade, most of them in blighted buildings, and there is one act of arson for every 65 residents — compared to one per 3,808 in New York, according to National Review Online.

Thousands of abandoned buildings need to be demolished. But that’s where the red tape comes in:

Anyone wanting to demolish a structure must fill out a four-page application in person.

Signatures are then required from five different departments, and collecting them takes up to four hours.

Owners must prove ownership before they can be permitted to tear down a blighted building, or show that the owner has consented to a demolition, requiring more paperwork.

Each demolition permit costs $254.

The demolition team must show documentation that gas, water, and electricity have been disconnected, and labor contracts have often demanded that unionized utility workers are the only people authorized to disconnect. It costs $660 to turn off the water and $720 to disconnect electricity and gas.

If the city judges a house too large for volunteers to demolish it, a professional contractor must be hired.

After the walls are torn down, an inspector must visit the site for an open-hole inspection, which, along with the cost of filling the sewer lines, adds $500 to $1,000 to the cost. Also, fresh dirt must be purchased and used to fill the hole.

Tearing down a single blighted building costs between $10,000 and $12,000.

“To eradicate existing blight in Detroit would cost about half a billion dollars at the current rate, and that’s in a city with a $327 million accumulated deficit and $14.9 billion in unfunded liabilities,” according to the National Review article written by Jillian Kay Melchior, a Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow for the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.

Citing the rules and regulations relating to demolishing properties, John George, founder of a nonprofit that has worked on more than 1,500 abandoned Detroit houses over the past 25 years, said the government has been “interfering with our ability and others’ ability” to deal with the blight.

“We have more volunteers than the city has employees. Many of them are skilled electricians, carpenters. We know how to disconnect gas and water lines. It would be considerably cheaper if they would just get out of our way and let us do it.”

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