8 The post-crisis properties of demolishing Detroit, Michigan
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Michael R.J. Koscielniak
Abstract
Between 2005 and 2015, nearly 140,000 homes in Detroit faced mortgage or tax foreclosure. The Great Recession obliterated black wealth, shattered neighbourhoods and intensified economic uncertainty in US metropolises already weakened by decades of institutionalised segregation and population loss (Kurth and MacDonald, 2015). Over the course of just a few years, residents of Detroit fled in numbers bested only by New Orleans, LA, during the post-Hurricane Katrina flight. In May 2014, Motor City Mapping – a project of the public–private Detroit Blight Removal Task Force (DBRTF) – identified 78,000 buildings in some state of disrepair. DBRTF leaders concluded over 40,000 of these structures needed immediate demolition (Clark, 2014). The largest residential demolition programme in US history began awarding contracts that summer (Dolan, 2014).
For many, smashing these empty structures was common sense to escape the aftermath of the Great Recession and, like online mortgage impresario Dan Gilbert and Mayor Mike Duggan, most did not baulk at the billion-dollar price tag of a blight-free city. They shared the belief that vacant land was Detroit’s competitive advantage. In 2013, Gilbert – the Chairman of Quicken Loans and a staunch defender of his company’s poor record of mortgage foreclosures – said empty parcels would attract interests that ‘are going to develop them and develop them in mass as soon as we get the structures down and maybe we don’t have to worry about raising peas or corn or whatever it is you do in the farm’ (McGraw, 2013).
Abstract
Between 2005 and 2015, nearly 140,000 homes in Detroit faced mortgage or tax foreclosure. The Great Recession obliterated black wealth, shattered neighbourhoods and intensified economic uncertainty in US metropolises already weakened by decades of institutionalised segregation and population loss (Kurth and MacDonald, 2015). Over the course of just a few years, residents of Detroit fled in numbers bested only by New Orleans, LA, during the post-Hurricane Katrina flight. In May 2014, Motor City Mapping – a project of the public–private Detroit Blight Removal Task Force (DBRTF) – identified 78,000 buildings in some state of disrepair. DBRTF leaders concluded over 40,000 of these structures needed immediate demolition (Clark, 2014). The largest residential demolition programme in US history began awarding contracts that summer (Dolan, 2014).
For many, smashing these empty structures was common sense to escape the aftermath of the Great Recession and, like online mortgage impresario Dan Gilbert and Mayor Mike Duggan, most did not baulk at the billion-dollar price tag of a blight-free city. They shared the belief that vacant land was Detroit’s competitive advantage. In 2013, Gilbert – the Chairman of Quicken Loans and a staunch defender of his company’s poor record of mortgage foreclosures – said empty parcels would attract interests that ‘are going to develop them and develop them in mass as soon as we get the structures down and maybe we don’t have to worry about raising peas or corn or whatever it is you do in the farm’ (McGraw, 2013).
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents vii
- List of figures and tables ix
- Notes on contributors xi
- Acknowledgements xiv
- Introduction 1
-
Rethinking ruination in the post-crisis context
- Rem(a)inders of loss: a Lacanian approach to new urban ruins 21
- Dignifying the ruins: a former Jewish girls’ school in Berlin 35
- Traversing wastelands: reflections on an abandoned railway yard 53
- Building the new urban ruin: the ghost city of Ordos Kangbashi, Inner Mongolia 73
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The political economy of urban vacant space
- Nullius no more? Valorising vacancy through urban agriculture in the settler-colonial ‘green city’ 91
- Conflicting rationalities and messy actualities of dealing with vacant housing in Halle/Saale, East Germany 109
- Post-disaster ruins: the old, the new and the temporary 125
- The post-crisis properties of demolishing Detroit, Michigan 145
- Guarding presence: absent owners and the labour of managing vacancy 163
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Reappropriating urban vacant spaces
- Politicising vacancy and commoning housing in municipalist Barcelona 181
- Spatio-legal world-making in vacant buildings: property politics and squatting movements in the city of São Paulo 197
- (Im)Material infrastructures and the reproduction of alternative social projects in urban vacant spaces 211
- Tracing the role of material and immaterial infrastructures in imagining diverse urban futures: Dublin’s Bolt Hostel and Apollo House 229
- Conclusion: Centring vacancy – towards a research agenda 243
- Index 251
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents vii
- List of figures and tables ix
- Notes on contributors xi
- Acknowledgements xiv
- Introduction 1
-
Rethinking ruination in the post-crisis context
- Rem(a)inders of loss: a Lacanian approach to new urban ruins 21
- Dignifying the ruins: a former Jewish girls’ school in Berlin 35
- Traversing wastelands: reflections on an abandoned railway yard 53
- Building the new urban ruin: the ghost city of Ordos Kangbashi, Inner Mongolia 73
-
The political economy of urban vacant space
- Nullius no more? Valorising vacancy through urban agriculture in the settler-colonial ‘green city’ 91
- Conflicting rationalities and messy actualities of dealing with vacant housing in Halle/Saale, East Germany 109
- Post-disaster ruins: the old, the new and the temporary 125
- The post-crisis properties of demolishing Detroit, Michigan 145
- Guarding presence: absent owners and the labour of managing vacancy 163
-
Reappropriating urban vacant spaces
- Politicising vacancy and commoning housing in municipalist Barcelona 181
- Spatio-legal world-making in vacant buildings: property politics and squatting movements in the city of São Paulo 197
- (Im)Material infrastructures and the reproduction of alternative social projects in urban vacant spaces 211
- Tracing the role of material and immaterial infrastructures in imagining diverse urban futures: Dublin’s Bolt Hostel and Apollo House 229
- Conclusion: Centring vacancy – towards a research agenda 243
- Index 251
