Solving Detroit’s blight, one scary poster at a time
Good news has been in short supply in Detroit, of late.
There’s the bankruptcy, of course. And then there is the blight. Which, according to a new federal report, is going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars more to clean up than anyone thought. Its a huge challenge, but you don’t need to tell that to Erica Gerson.
“It’s 330 pages, that is a lot of digesting,” said Gerson, Chair of the Detroit’s Land Bank Authority, which is in charge of dealing with the broken down properties the city owns. “One of the problems here is there are houses that having been sitting empty for three to five years and they are not getting any better. So we have to get our hands on them faster.”
Gerson says sometimes a direct approach is the best way to deal with neglectful landlords.
“I have a staff of attorneys who go out and put big posters on [abandoned] houses that say ‘Call this number within 72 hours or your property will be seized by the Detroit Land Bank.’ That tends to get the landlord’s attention.”
Gerson says that, yes, the task before her can seem daunting. But she doesn’t have to look far for signs that the city is getting better.
“Yesterday people saw a man who they thought was scrapping–tearing down the gutters on a beautiful old house that seemed abandoned. When the police got there, instead of arresting the man, they started laughing…turned out that it was one of the houses we had postered. And [the man] was putting up brand new gutters. A lady in the neighborhood said she hadn’t seen anyone do that in 20 years. That’s what keeps you going.”
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