How Do You Fight Blight? This Man Has an Answer

It’s been 30 years since John George turned around his first crack house.
While living in the Old Redford neighborhood of Detroit — which, like almost every major city in the 1980s, was decaying in large part due to the crack epidemic — he decided one day he was going to give a blighted home a facelift. George repainted the house, repaired the broken windows and tended to the lawn.
From there, fixing up derelict houses became a weekly thing.
“I’m half Lebanese, half Italian and 100 percent Detroit stubborn. Once we get something in our heart and in our head, it’s almost autopilot,” George tells NationSwell, adding that he never considered simply moving away. “I didn’t think leaving the city was the proper thing to do.”
At first George’s goal was to stop property values in his neighborhood from diminishing any further. But as he started fixing up the houses that surrounded his own, he discovered his efforts could have a much larger impact in helping his hometown recover. It’s an idea that has caught on in other cities battling blight: Clean up the streets and empty lots, and you have a recipe for lowering crime and encouraging community engagement and business development.
As multiple studies in different cities have shown, vacant lots and dilapidated homes are key indicators of poverty and crime.
In Detroit, the problem was particularly pronounced. The mortgage crisis of the 1990s, when property ownership began to dramatically decline, was soon followed by the 2008 housing crisis. The city declared bankruptcy, resulting in illegal trash dumping in the streets and plenty of burnt-out and abandoned homes.
“Things started to deteriorate. Problems started to escalate. We had serious problems with our mayors, and the biggest question people had was how did Detroit get to where it is,” says George, who founded the nonprofit Detroit Blight Busters in 1988. “There’s a lot of blame to go around. But blaming people and things weren’t going to fix anything. So instead of blaming, I thought we should do something.”
Every Saturday, George and his Blight Busters cofounder would meet and then go fix something up. A park. A home. A street corner. No project was too small.
“We weren’t naive enough to think we would stop crime or anything, but we wanted to at least minimize the decrease of property values,” he says. It was an antidote to the city’s response, which was to simply board up the houses or demolish them completely. “We didn’t want to be part of the problem of tearing down houses, but be part of the solution to make them nice.”
With thousands of blighted buildings in the Motor City still standing, George and his crew of volunteers, who so far have more than 1,500 renovations under their belts, remain committed to revitalizing as many of them as they can.

A SCALABLE MODEL CATCHES ON

Other cities have taken up similar initiatives. Durham, North Carolina, was one of the first to ban plywood on abandoned homes, instead covering them up with clear polycarbonate. Officials there claim that the change has helped sell the vacant buildings.
In Philadelphia, workers are dispatched to clean up vacant lots and property owners who don’t take care of their land are fined. The city also works with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society through the Philadelphia LandCare program, which has “cleaned and greened” thousands of abandoned properties since 1999.
The result has been a noticeable decrease in crime and an upswing in economic mobility for the neighborhoods.
“Just by the changing the neighborhoods, people’s attitudes toward their community has changed,” says Thomas Conway, deputy managing director of the city’s Community Life Improvements Programs. “Its given them hope.”
Revitalization of the lots include clearing debris, grading the land, planting trees and erecting post-and-rail fencing, essentially transforming the land into de facto parks. In 2010, the city passed an ordinance that mandates private owners of abandoned buildings to install working doors and windows, or face steep fines.
“We’ve cleaned and gleamed about 8,000 properties and 23,000 vacant lots with the Horticultural Society, and at the cost of only a few million dollars,” Conway says. “Compare that to incarceration costs per person, or the cost of poverty, and the benefits far outweigh everything else.”
A decade-long study of the greening program in Philadelphia looked at lots in four areas that were revitalized. It found a direct association between blighted vacant lots and gun assaults; after those lots were cleaned up, there were statistically significant decreases in firearm violence and an uptick in residents’ overall health.
Another study, published in The American Journal of Public Health, backed up those findings. That study examined the results of Philadelphia’s blight-remediation programs on 5,112 vacant lots and buildings, and found that gun violence decreased by 39 percent when buildings were renovated and by almost 5 percent around vacant lots that were beautified. The researches concluded that “there is something unique to firearm violence that makes it especially treatable with programs that transform blighted urban environments.”
For every dollar spent on Philadelphia’s blight program, as much as $26 in net benefits were made.

AHEAD OF THE CURVE

Back in Detroit, George has seen similar returns through his work with Blight Busters. The organization has raised over $20 million from local businesses, sports teams and philanthropists to finance their continued revitalization efforts. He says there’s been a noticeable return on that investment.
An abandoned high school George helped clean up was eventually turned into a shopping center, a $33 million investment. And two blocks of now-prime retail space that Blight Busters renovated were recently snapped up for $3.5 million.
“Because of that $20 million investment, we’ve been able to attract millions of dollars more, [which goes] right back into our community,” George says.
The Blight Busters’ success didn’t just raise property values and make Detroit’s streets prettier and safer. It also became a model for other cities.
“Our investment, our time and energy, was worthwhile, because it not only saved our neighborhood but the whole city. When everyone left, we were holding down the fort till the calvary returned,” he says. “I know it’s because of our work that Detroit is on the right path to recovery. We were just a little ahead of the curve.”

From Blight to Beauty in the Motor City

In 1988, John George moved his family into a house five blocks north of the Old Redford neighborhood in Detroit. Shortly there after, a crew of drug dealers took up residence in a derelict property behind his home.
“My instinct as a father was to flee,” says George. Instead, he grabbed some nails, a hammer and plywood from a hardware store and boarded up the house.
Almost 30 years later, George is still fixing up deserted properties. Watch the video above to see how his organization, Detroit Blight Busters, is revitalizing the Motor City — one building at a time.
“If you never quit, you can’t lose ’cause you’re still in the game,” says George. “And Detroit is still in the game.”

Battling Blight With … Plastic?

Just one boarded-up home can disfigure an entire city block. Studies have shown that crime rates shoot up by 19 percent within 250 feet of a vacant foreclosure, while surrounding property values plummet by $7,386 — a huge blow to weakened housing markets. Perhaps worst of all, these unoccupied, unmaintained buildings can sever neighborhood ties, driving more residents to move out.
In May 2014, officials in Durham, N.C., tested out a novel idea to battle blight. The college town, home to Duke University, couldn’t afford drastic changes, like bulldozing every vacancy or subsidizing new home ownership. But they could disguise the eyesores. To do so, the city banned all plywood boarding on abandoned homes. Instead, they turned to clear, hard plastic.
“We’ve found that it makes an enormous difference for the feel and health of the neighborhood,” says Faith Gardner, a housing code administrator who enforces the ordinance. “It tends to let housing prices stabilize, even with a number of vacancies. We’re not seeing the same drop in real estate prices and increases in crime.”
To date, a construction company contracted by the city has installed the see-through, sturdy plastic sheets on 64 properties. (The high-density plastic, known as polycarbonate, is also used for eyeglasses, airplane windows and motorcycle windshields.) According to officials, the change to plastic has helped sell more of these vacant buildings. Back in 2011, when the city began targeting blight, there were nearly 500 boarded-up homes; as of the new year, the city has cleaned up 90 percent of the problem. Only 56 abandoned buildings remain.

An abandoned house in Durham, N.C., before plywood boards were replaced with polycarbonate coverings.

The trend has also taken off in other cities, becoming official policy in Phoenix and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. This month, Ohio became the first to mandate “clear-boarding” statewide.
Back in Durham, officials hope that the new material will deter vandalism, prostitution and drug use in the empty structures. Durham’s police department did not respond to a request for the latest stats, but the reasons why public safety might improve are clear. For one, it’s harder for a wrongdoer to pick out which lots might make a good hideout. “You can look at a certain angle, and you might get a reflection [from the plastic] that clues you in. But, really, you have to look hard to figure it out,” says Gardner. Police, meanwhile, can easily look through the transparent plastic to check for illegal activity.
The new material is also far harder to break. Previously, “they’d rip off the back door and go in,” Gardner adds. But “you can hit the [polycarbonate] with a baseball bat, and it won’t shatter.”
The one downside? Polycarbonate doesn’t come cheap. A 4-by-8-foot sheet of plywood costs around $11, while a plastic window cover the same size runs closer to $115. A door with several locks boosts the price by another $395. But to Gardner, the benefit to homeowners is “immeasurable.” She only has one regret about how Durham has implemented the change: “We really wish we had done it sooner.”
Continue reading “Battling Blight With … Plastic?”

Here’s An Idea to Stabilize Neighborhoods and Help Veterans

It’s a simple idea: Why not revitalize blighted communities by housing heroes in vacant homes?
In Pittsburg, California, a Bay Area town that’s come upon some hard times recently, disabled veteran J.R. Wilson is rallying the community by attempting to solve the problems of homelessness among local service members and neighborhoods full of abandoned houses.
Wilson, the executive director of the nonprofit Delta Veterans Group, told Angela Hart of the Contra Costa Times, “We are working with local leaders and the community to bring veterans into our neighborhoods and to fill our vacant houses. This will not only help fight our blight problems, but it’ll help veterans who are transitioning into civilian life and who may be facing homelessness or who could have suicidal thoughts.”
On June 28, the American Legion Post in Antioch, California hosted a “Veterans Home-Buying Triage” event, bringing together local veterans with real estate professionals, mortgage lenders, and city officials. Wilson helped organize a similar event in Pittsburg a few weeks earlier.
Wilson’s goal is to bring the area back to its former glory. “Growing up here, we never used to see this much vacancy or homelessness,” he said. “We really want to get the attention of asset managers and city officials, then work with code enforcement and get those houses on the market.”
The new programs come just in the nick of time for Army veteran Alan Johnson, who told Hart, “We just got married, and we found out we’re expecting.” After meeting with a local mortgage consultant at the Pittsburg event, Johnson is now well on his way to finding an affordable home for his growing family.
MORE: Minnesota Looks to a Historic Structure to Help End Veteran Homelessness