Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now: how Detroit is tackling a staggering amount of blight with some unusual help. The city is going through the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.
Earlier today, a judge ruled that Detroit is permitted to shut off water for residents if they don’t pay their bills. This comes as the city is under a great deal of pressure to turn around its larger deteriorating situation, including thousands of shuttered buildings.
Special correspondent Christy McDonald from Detroit Public Television has our story, as part of the Detroit Journalism Cooperative, funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation and the Renaissance Journalism Project of the Ford Foundation.
CHRISTY MCDONALD, Detroit Public Television: A demolition crew at work in Northwest Detroit. This one crew will knock down up to 10 houses in a day. Ronald Garrison lives next door to this one, vacant for years. Trespassers looted it of anything of value.
RONALD GARRISON: The man down the street boarded it up. And they used to come rip the boards off and still go back in there. And he would have to come board it up again.
CHRISTY MCDONALD: The numbers are in. There are nearly 80,000 dilapidated structures across the city of Detroit, a number so high because of scrappers, vandals tearing everything of value out of vacant properties, leaving them open to the elements. Once there is structural damage, the houses have to come down.
DERRICK WATTS: Oh yes.
The scrapping is so rampant, Derrick Watts says even inhabited homes can be targets.
DERRICK WATTS: You have to watch your house even if you go on vacation. You can go on vacation, and come back and your house will be scrapped. So you got to watch it, really, 24 hours a day, because that’s the thing now. That’s the hustle now.
CHRISTY MCDONALD: With the city bankrupt and operating under an emergency manager, Detroit’s new mayor, Michael Duggan, is focusing on the demolition of the tens of thousands of houses stripped beyond repair.
1 comment:
I hope Detroit will be able to stay afloat once this Bankruptcy trial ends. Duggan has his work cut out for him, and not a lot of backers.
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