Tag: Detroit

How Do You Fight Blight? This Man Has an Answer

Posted on by robbie

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.”

Highland Park Takes Power Back

Posted on by robbie

Soulardarity is a nonprofit organization that puts energy control in the hands of the community.
After a utility company repossessed more than 1,000 streetlights in Highland Park, the Michigan-based group began raising money to install solar-powered streetlights on the town’s dark streets.
Soulardarity envisions a future where energy is cooperatively owned and the wealth it generates is used to make communities stronger together.

10 Outstanding Solutions of 2017

Posted on by robbie

Across the country, changemakers are operating behind the scenes, working to solve some of America’s most daunting problems. They do so humbly, without seeking praise or notoriety. At NationSwell, we’ve always sought to elevate the innovation and tenacity of their efforts in the hopes of inspiring more people to action. Here, a celebration of the top work in 2017.
My Final Act of Service
Before Marine Corps veteran Anthony Egan dies, he has several lessons he wants to teach his son.
Disarmed: The Reclaiming of a City From Epic Gun Violence
In a community that’s experienced a 200 percent increase in the number of shootings in the past three years alone, ordinary residents are becoming peacekeepers.
The Rx for Better Birth Control
Colorado attempts to end the cycle of poverty by preventing unplanned pregnancy.
When Liberals and Conservatives Came Together on the Environment
Today’s politicians should look to the past for inspiration on how to achieve bipartisan legislation for the good of the planet.
From Blight to Beauty in the Motor City
It started with a dad protecting his family from drug dealers. Thirty years later, his revitalization efforts are still going strong.

An illustration inspired by the #metoo movement.

3 Ways to Show Empathy When Talking About Sexual Assault
The words used when speaking about sexual assault can have an impact on what others view as acceptable.
Neo-Nazi Music Is on the Rise. These Companies and People Are Taking It On
A former white supremacist fights back against the alt-right’s use of music to spread a message of hate.
A Prison With No Walls
Can a facility that relies on strict discipline instead of barbed wire and bars result in lower recidivism rates?
6 Stunning Art Projects That Are Making Cities Healthier
Cities across the nation recognize the revitalizing powers of beautiful community art.
The School Where Only Addicts Roam the Hallways
A cohort of sober youth confronts the realities of living drug free.

The Cultivation of Post-Military Lives

Posted on by robbie

Gordon Soderberg spent six years as a member of the U.S. Navy, but he found that his skills would be better served stateside tackling a different issue: natural disasters.
“Military teaches basic skills of being able to mobilize, to get a lot of work with a number of people” says Soderberg. “But for potential disasters that come, [a veteran is] a perfect responder to do that.”
From his work with groups like Team Rubicon and Detroit Blight Busters, Soderberg developed the idea of Veterans Village. Watch the video above to see how it’s helping veterans extend their service.
“Veterans bring an attitude of get the work done. They have leadership skills,” he says. “By having Blight Busters and the blight of Detroit as bootcamp for veterans, we get to help clean up Detroit while training.”

From Blight to Beauty in the Motor City

Posted on by robbie

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.”

10 Infrastructure Projects We’d Like to See Get Off the Ground

Posted on by robbie

In his victory speech, Donald J. Trump vowed to “rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals.” The investment is long overdue: The American Society of Civil Engineers, in its most recent national assessment, rated the country’s infrastructure as a D-plus, just above failing. The group estimates that, by 2025, the nation will need a $1.44 trillion boost over current funding levels to meet growing needs.

Since 2009, when Barack Obama doled out roughly $800 billion in a stimulus package, that money’s been hard to come by, largely blocked by partisanship. But advocates hope the election of Trump, who made his fortune in real estate, could launch a building boom. The Republican president, so used to seeing his name on gilded skyscrapers, hotels, casinos and golf courses, could cut a deal with congressional Democrats, who view public-works projects as an engine for job growth.

Assuming Trump can indeed pass a bill, we at NationSwell have a few ideas for him to consider. A big, beautiful wall’s not one of them; instead, here’s the top 10 shovel-worthy alternatives we’d like the new administration to undertake.

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How One Tech Company Is Crowdsourcing America’s Largest Land-Use Map

Posted on by robbie

In 2014, Twiana Odom and her daughter paid rent for a home on Detroit’s east side to a man with a forged deed. When yellow tax foreclosure notices started appearing in her mailbox, addressed to a different name than her landlord’s, Odom realized she’d been scammed. Unable to reach the real owner, Odom asked a nonprofit to bid on the house at a county auction. They pledged up to $3,000, but it wasn’t enough to beat a land speculator who paid $3,200. The new owner promptly served Odom with an eviction notice and when a TV news crew located Odom this spring, she was living in a van in a nearby empty lot. She said she still cuts the grass in front of her old home, which remains vacant.
The millions of foreclosures that characterized the post-2008 recession can seem like the result of bad luck or tragic circumstances. But a troupe of young mapmakers in Detroit is trying to analyze them as a matter of policy, which can be improved with better data. As a cartographic experiment, started as Motor City Mapping and now known as Loveland Technologies, amateur surveyors knocked on doors to gather info on Detroit homeowners, compared their observations with public records (like whether mail had been delivered in the last 90 days) and uploaded the findings online. The color-coded maps identify properties that are blighted, vacant or in tax arrears. By looking at the hard data, decision-makers could have spotted the damage an 18 percent interest rate on delinquent taxes was causing, or more precisely in Odom’s case, they might have questioned whether booting the family at Buckingham Avenue was worth the unpaid funds.

From Loveland’s website, a satellite view of a neighborhood in Detroit. This aerial view allows users to identify properties that are blighted, vacant, or in arrears.

“The underlying grid of land ownership and taxation was always designed to be public information. Somewhere along the line, we forgot about that,” says Jerry Paffendorf, the 34-year-old co-founder and CEO of Loveland. “Ownership of the country is the most fundamental way that cities operate or don’t operate. Bankruptcy is very much because of a drop in property taxes, and our inadequate use of land is the main driver of why police and ambulances don’t show up and why schools close.”
Seeing how data shaped housing decisions in Detroit, Loveland Technologies has spent the last two years assembling parcel information nationwide. Out of 3,200 counties, they’ve obtained data from more than 2,000 assessors, accounting for about 94 percent of the places where Americans live. From what Loveland’s 17-member team can tell, it’s the largest publicly available dataset ever assembled, and it’s readily accessible to local governments, real estate developers, community land trusts, neighborhood associations, university researchers and concerned citizens, all on one free website. “Title companies and real estate companies that assemble something similar charge absolutely ungodly prices to access it: a quarter million just to look, and if you share anything you’re in big trouble,” says Paffendorf.
Loveland Technologies (its name comes from a dense tome on property law that Paffendorf inherited, inscribed to a lawyer named Susan Loveland) is very different from Zillow, the real estate site that instructs homebuyers on prices. The data can guide taxation, zoning, historic preservation, transportation — anything tied to where people live. Researchers have asked the company to overlay the map with other measurements of poverty, education and health, but Paffendorf believes that there’s already a wealth of insights to be mined from property rolls’ minutia. “We have a relentless focus on the parcel of property — even on being able to see it, to know what its legal boundaries are — because rights are tied to it,” he explains.
Beyond big-picture planning decisions, Paffendorf hopes the maps also inspire small instances of civic engagement. He hopes that users will build maps and share them on the site, creating a Wikipedia-style “virtuous loop,” and he wants urbanites to look up who owns vacant lots and set up something cool in their place. As more people latch on to the site’s tools, you can expect brighter maps to emerge from American cities: less vacancy, fewer tax foreclosures and a land we can all love.
Homepage photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images

The Journey of an Idea: This Entrepreneur Took a Cross-Country Trip to Fine-Tune His Higher Education Gamechanger

Posted on by robbie

Seated in a 1930s Pullman train car, Phillip Ellison carved a broad arc across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Milwaukee, Detroit. Ellison had no final endpoint toward which his locomotive was rushing: he was simply riding the rails, as part of the Millennial Trains Project (MTP), a nonprofit venture with Comcast NBCUniversal, a lead partner of the journey. Along with 25 other young adults, he was making a nine-day, transcontinental trek this August to open himself to new ideas for ULink, his new startup that’s in the works. “[MTP is promoting] American innovation, entrepreneurship and trans-regional understanding of the United States, by allowing people doing social impact to come together,” Ellison says.
In the early stages of developing a tech platform to assist community college students, Ellison wanted to spend the 3,100-mile journey homing in on his product’s capabilities and its growth potential, while discovering what other young people were doing in their hometowns. As the American West rushed by his window, he engaged the other social entrepreneurs and rising nonprofit leaders in conversation: Where were they all headed, and how could they help each other get there?
Onboard MTP, Ellison hammered out ideas for ULink, a website that will help community college students engage with on-campus resources (such as advising sessions to map out the credits that four-year colleges require or counseling to help deal with tough emotional situations) and successfully transfer to a four-year university. Ellison, a one-time dropout wrapping up his bachelor’s degree at Tufts University in Massachusetts, wanted to hear what had helped his peers navigate their undergraduate experience and whether community college counselors and transfer advisors, faculty members, students and IT programmers in each of MTP’s five stops would be open to using the platform. Aided by their insights, he’s planning to launch a beta pilot of the website within the next year at a community college in the Boston area.
“Community college is often a head-down experience. Students do not know what’s happening on campus, and they’re not accessing resources until it’s too late,” Ellison explains to NationSwell. On the administrative side, counseling “processes are not quite modernized, digital or up to date. You see the limitations of a human being in terms of resources.” ULink is still in beta development, but once launched, it will help counselors manage their students, see who’s coming in and who’s been out of touch and send text message check-ins through a mobile app — allowing them to reach more students all at once.
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Ellison knows about the necessity of college advising more acutely than most. He was forced to leave Penn State University prematurely due to a lack of financial aid. “That was one of the darkest times in my life, to be frank,” he says. Like many students arriving at four-year institutions, he says he didn’t fully comprehend higher education’s blockbuster price tag, even at a public school. Looking back, he wishes he had known more about the financial aspects of college. (For instance, public schools charge more to out-of-state residents, and with rare exception, student loans stick with most people even after a declaration of bankruptcy.) Constantly worrying about his bank accounts, Ellison’s grades fell precipitously. He dropped out and returned home to East Harlem.
That’s not to say Ellison was giving up. “I decided to go home and spend some time thinking about what I was going to do, to right the ship basically,” he explains. Almost immediately, he went to work as a manual laborer. Alongside middle-aged underrepresented workers, the teenager manned demolition projects in Brooklyn and moved corporate furniture in Manhattan. No boss seemed to value worker contributions at those temp jobs, he noticed. They didn’t provide healthcare benefits, and they offered no job security — a daily reality for millions of Americans who never obtained a college degree, he saw.
Eventually, Ellison was accepted to serve as an AmeriCorps member with City Year, assisting a green energy startup. (There, he met one of ULink’s current co-founders, Parisa Esmaili.) He leveraged that into a job at Citizen Schools, a nonprofit that provides extra hours of instruction at public middle schools. He also worked on campaigns for Obama’s reelection and a failed primary bid by Reshma Saujani (the founder of Girls Who Code) to be New York City’s public advocate. In retrospect, he says the series of jobs taught him leadership: by watching how a founder made tough decisions, by practicing at the front of a classroom and by trying to elect principled leaders.
In his off-hours, Ellison started attending classes at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, one of the City University of New York schools near the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. Once again, working families surrounded him. He saw many of his classmates pulled away from their education by the need to get a job to pay for their kids. Others, closer to him in age, didn’t seem to know how to navigate the school’s bureaucracy. On his second attempt at higher education, Ellison realized that community college students don’t know what four-year universities are looking for in applicants and understaffed counseling departments couldn’t provide all the help needed. “I saw folks stopping sometimes, because they didn’t know what their end goal could be or how to get to that point,” he says. “The mentors were not checking in on them. It’s not a seamless transition.”
After a long hiatus from a four-year college, Ellison returned to school at Tufts last year. At times, he feels out of place, coming from the South Bronx to a bucolic research institution with a billion-dollar endowment that predates the Civil War. There, he lived with Jubril Lawal (a former classmate at Hostos and current co-founder of ULink), and together they translated their own experience negotiating educational barriers into ULink’s platform. ”By merging tech and human interactions in a strategic way,” says Ellison, who regularly folds business school lingo into ULink’s sales pitch, “our premise is that closing some of the advising and engagement gaps will promote completion and persistence and improve the overall student experience.” Where Ellison once felt disconnected, he hopes the app will provide clarity and direction, those touch points that tie a person to a larger institution.
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Through conversations with other train ride participants and with people at various city stops, Ellison deepened his understanding of the community college system. He asked why certain schools have off-the-charts transfer rates, while others are dropout factories. How can his platform make a student feel at home on a two-year commuter campus, in the same way that a student living in the dorms at a four-year institution participates in the school’s history and traditions? Will a few text messages be enough?
His cross-country sojourn confirmed that he’s asking the right questions. At a City College of San Francisco, he showed the school’s chief technology officer his beta product, and the administrator shared insights about the inadequacies of older education planning software and his decision-making calculus for new technology. Ellison speculated ULink may have just gained “a key adviser.” Back on the train, he discussed his ideas with his mentors and other social entrepreneurs. Fauzia Musa, from the design firm IDEO, reminded him that if students found some real value in the product and used it to solve their challenges, then colleges would quickly fall into line. Those “new understandings and unique opportunities for growth” proved vital to understanding what ULink could be.
Now it’s a matter of Ellison putting his answers into practice. The steaming train may have pulled into the final station, but his real journey is just beginning.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Homepage photo courtesy of Millennial Trains Project.
 

Why the Motor City’s 50-Year Plan Should Be a Blueprint for Other Urban Areas

Posted on by robbie

Detroit is riddled with problems. As the struggling city climbs out of bankruptcy and rethinks a revitalization plan, community leaders and nonprofits are banding together under a 50-year plan to transform the Motor City into the thriving urban area it once was.
Detroit Future City (DFC), which found its inception in city hall, has grown into a local think tank situated downtown with 15 members devoted to putting a strategic framework into place over the next five decades. The plan was born out of the Detroit Works Long-Term Planning initiative, founded by former Mayor Dave Bing. In 2012, after two long years of community meetings and input, the initiative announced a 347-page outline and rebranded itself as DFC.
Through five planning areas including land use, economic growth, neighborhoods, city systems and building assets, the 50-year plan provides a look at how to leverage Detroit’s many assets to reboot the city. But the plan is not just focused on the long-term outlook; it also includes short-term goals to keep the city on track.
For example, DFC created a Carbon Buffering Pilot Program and enlisted the nonprofit Greening of Detroit to run it. The program is focused on planting trees on vacant land near major expressways to absorb carbon dioxide and other pollutions from cars.
While experts have lauded the plan as an “unprecedented effort,” according to Calvin Gladney, a Washington-based urban planner, it underscores a larger trend of public-private partnerships between city governments and nonprofit organizations. Instead of keeping an effort within the walls of city hall or one charity, combining efforts toward one goal brings new perspective and a better chance of success.
“The challenge is that the line of who’s a doer and who’s a thought-leader tends to blur,” Gladney says, “and you want to make sure everyone knows their role.”
MORE: Meet the CEO Who Wants to Bring 50,000 Immigrants to Detroit
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The Cross-Country Road Trip with Stops to Volunteer Along the Way

Posted on by robbie

Bland Hoke was planning a road trip from New York to his new home in Wyoming. But rather than stopping along the way to check out tourist spots and famous landmarks, the designer enlisted two friends to help him create urban workshops to innovate solutions to local problems.
With the help of filmmaker William Novak and the anonymous artist behind the Rotten Apple hacking project, Hoke documented what he accomplished along the way in a film called “Drive.”
“We looked for groups who are working on ways to improve urban environments, and decided to try to work with them on really short creative projects,” Hoke tells Fast Company. “We reached out to people in different cities and tried to more or less chart a line that went from New York to Wyoming.”
To mark the beginning of the journey, Hoke and his two friends began in New York City, working with hacktivists at Learn Do Share to transform old bike racks into chairs as well as fire hydrants into chess games on the street.
As they headed west, the three stopped in Detroit where they coordinated a project with Sit On It Detroit, a local grassroots group that outfits bus stops with built-in mini libraries.

“We helped them come up with a new bench,” Hoke says. “They told us they started with nothing, no design background, just high school shop class. We helped push the project a little bit further.”

While in the Midwest, Hoke breezed through Chicago and met up with Cooperation Operation, a nonprofit that turns vacant land into educational and empowerment projects, to help create a community posting board out of scraps that had been thrown away. The group also worked their way through Milwaukee, as well as an impromptu stop in Omaha to help kids on an art project.

“Sometimes you can plan these journeys, and take a bunch of time and try to make it perfect, but sometimes serendipity is the best thing,” he says.

Hoke partially funded the project through a Kickstarter project initially intended for Softwalks, an urban intervention for construction sites. Due to city regulation and permit challenges, Softwalks was unable to launch successfully, which is why Hoke used the funding for “Drive” instead.

“I could have just packed up the car, drove, and got to where I was going,” Hoke explains. “But we had the chance to do a creative project. I think it’s wonderful to travel across the country and find like-minded people who are working on really interesting projects.”

Hopefully “Drive” will inspire more Americans to take on a more creative way of road-tripping.

MORE: 7 Key Drivers to Turn Social Innovation into Success