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AFP Shrinking Detroit has 12,000 abandoned homes Sun Aug 14, 5:03 PM ET DETROIT, United States (AFP) - Rats or lead poisoning. When it comes to t he threats from the broken down house next door, Dorothy Bates isn't sur e which is worse.
Click Here "When it's lightening and thundering you can hear the bricks just falling ," the 40-year-old nurse said as she looked at the smashed windows and g arbage-strewn porch. "If you call and ask (the city) about it they say t hey don't have the funds to tear it down." There are more than 12,000 abandoned homes in the Detroit area, a byprodu ct of decades of layoffs at the city's auto plants and white flight to t he suburbs. And despite scores of attempts by government and civic leade rs to set the city straight, the automobile capitol of the world seems t rapped in a vicious cycle of urban decay. Detroit has lost more than half its population since its heyday in the 19 50's.
The city is in a budget crisis so deep it could end up being run by the state. And it just got knocked off the list of the nation's ten largest cities. "Detroit has become an icon of what's considered urban decline," said Jun e Thomas, a professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State U niversity. It's getting people in the city who can become property owners and stay property owners and pa y taxes." Perhaps the biggest challenge to luring the middle class from the area's swank suburbs is overcoming racial tensions, said Stephen Vogel, dean of the school of architecture at University of Detroit Mercy. "Suburbanites are taking the bodies of their relatives out of cemeteries because they're afraid to come to the city," Vogel said. "There are abou t 400 to 500 hundred (being moved) a year which shows you the depth of r acism and fear." Most American cities have experienced a shift towards the suburbs. What made Detroit's experience so stark was the lack of regional planning and the ease with which developments were able to incorporate into new cities in order to avoid sharing their tax revenue with the city, said M argaret Dewar, a professor of urban and regional planning at the Univers ity of Michigan. The fleeing businesses and homeowners left behind about 36 square miles ( 58 square kilometers) of vacant land. That's roughly the size of San Fra ncisco and about a quarter of Detroit's total land mass. While a decision by General Motors to build its new headquarters smack in the middle of downtown has helped lure young professionals and spark re development in some of the more desirable neighborhoods, there is little hope the vacant land will be filled any time soon. In his state of the city address, embattled mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said e ven if 10,000 new homes were built every year for the next 15 years "we wouldn't fill up our city." And Detroit is still losing about 10,000 people every year. One solution Vogel has proposed is to turn swaths of the city into farmla nd. In the four years since his students initiated a pilot project dozen s of community gardens and small farms have popped up. But first the city has to get rid of the crumbling buildings that haunt t he streets, luring criminals, arsonists and wild animals and creating a general sense of hopelessness. "It's partly a resource issue and it's partly a bureaucracy issue," said Eric Dueweke, the community partnership manager at the University of Mic higan's College of Architecture and Urban Planning. "It takes them forever to find the proper owners of the properties and se rve them with the proper paperwork," he said. "They're tearing them down at the rate of 1,500 or 2,000 a year, so they're really not cutting int o the backlog in any significant way because that's how many are coming on stream." Dorothy Bates has been waiting three years for the crumbling house next d oor to be torn down. There are nine more on her short block along with s everal vacant lots that are overgrown with weeds. Bates does her best to keep her five children away from the rat nests, bu t the lead creeping out of crumbling bricks and peeling paint drifts in through her windows. The most frustrating part of it, says her neighbor Larry, is that so many of the abandoned houses could be repaired.
The infor mation contained in the AFP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Agenc e France Presse.
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